Centre for Internet and Society

Data for Governance, Governance of Data, and Data Anxieties

sumandro — 2016-07-03T05:59:48Z

The Center for International Media Assistance (CIMA) organised a panel discussion on 'The Data Explosion – How the Internet of Things will Affect Media Freedom and Communication Systems?' at Deutsche Welle's Global Media Forum 2016, held in Bonn, Germany during June 13-15, 2016. Sumandro Chattapadhyay was invited as one of the panelists.

Introduction to the Panel

The emerging Internet of Things (IoT) will result in a vast network of Internet-connected devices that generate enormous volumes of data about human behavior and interactions. This data explosion will potentially reshape how media organizations both collect and report news, while at the same time fundamentally shifting how communications networks are organized worldwide. Yet currently most of the discussion about the IoT has focused on its spread in developed countries via the popularization of Internet-connected consumer devices.

In this panel we will discuss how the IoT may develop differently in the Global South and how it could present either a threat to open access to data and information, or an opportunity to improve media systems worldwide. We will also examine the impact of the data explosion in developing countries and what mechanisms need to be created in order to ensure the huge new mountain of data is used and governed responsibly.

The discussants were Carlos Affonso Souza (Director, Institute for Technology and Society of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), Lorena Jaume-Palasi (Director for Communications, European Dialogue on Internet Governance, or EuroDIG, Switzerland), and Sumandro Chattapadhyay (Research Director, the Centre for Internet and Society, India); and the conversation was led by Mark Nelson (Senior Director, Center for International Media Assistance, or CIMA, USA).

Source: Deutsche Welle.

Audio Recording

Things/Writings I have Mentioned

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/data-for-governance-governance-of-data-and-data-anxieties

Policy Shaping in the Indian IT Industry: Recommendations by NASSCOM, 2006-2012

Pavishka Mittal — 2016-07-04T08:11:05Z

This is the first of a series of three blog posts, authored by Pavishka Mittal, tracking the engagements by NASSCOM and iSPIRT in suggesting and shaping the IT industry policies in India during 2006-2016. This posts focuses on the policy activities of NASSCOM in 2006-2012 with specific reference to Special Economic Zones, E-Commerce Industry and Transfer Pricing, along with a few other miscellaneous important recommendations.

1. Introduction

2. Tax Reforms in Special Economic Zones (SEZs)

3. E-Commerce Industry

4. Transfer Pricing Issues

5. Other Recommendations

5.1. Concerns with the Union Budget Proposals

5.2. Request for Clarity in Classification of Transactions and Guidelines

5.3. New Retrograde Obligations under Law

6. Endnotes

7. Author Profile

1. Introduction

The National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM) was established in 1988 as a non-profit, global trade association registered under the Indian Societies Act 1860 representing the interests of the IT Industry, now with over 1500 members. Its objective is to facilitate trade in the software development and services, software products, IT enabled/BPO services and e-commerce. It also undertakes research projects for facilitating innovation in advanced software and maintains data on industry trends, even a national database of registered and verified knowledge workers in the industry. Nevertheless, its role of policy advocacy cannot be over emphasized. It regularly interacts with the Government of India to bring about a favourable business environment for the IT Industry.

This blog post, the first part in a series, discusses NASSCOM’s major issues with policies of the Government of India in the period 2006-2012. The concerns of the IT industry, as highlighted by NASSCOM in the period aforementioned are with reference to the Special Economic Zones, E-Commerce Industry and Transfer Pricing broadly along with other miscellaneous important recommendations. The subsequent blog posts will focus on specific tax issues post 2012 and will elaborately discuss transfer pricing related concerns.

2. Tax Reforms in Special Economic Zones (SEZs)

The ITes and BPO industry constitutes a sizable portion of the number of SEZs in the country [1] so much so that it has been argued that the IT industry alone reaps the benefits of the SEZs and STPIs to the exclusion of the other sectors [2].

The most salient incentive in the SEZ Act enacted by the Government of India in 2005 had been income tax exemption of export profits which contributed to the scheme’s success in attracting major investments [3]. Further, exemption from minimum alternate tax had been provided under section 115JB of the Income Tax Act. However, in 2011, the government decided to impose a Minimum Alternate Tax upto the rate of 18.5% on the book profits of SEZ’s developers and units through the Finance Act 2012 by introducing amendments to the Income Tax Act 1961, to be effective from April 2012 [4]. NASSCOM took a strong stance against equality in corporate tax liability as such tax is sought to be imposed upon income derived from investments made with a commitment of tax exemption. The intention of the government in making such policies having regressive outcomes will be judged if key promised characteristics of SEZs were differential economic laws from the remaining domestic territory. For all practical purposes, they are deemed to be foreign territories for the levy of trade duties and tariffs [5]. In the case of Mindtree Limited v. Union of India [6], software company Mindtree argued that the imposition of MAT in SEZs was against the concept of promissory estoppel and the doctrine of legitimate expectation, which rendered such taxes constitutionally invalid [7]. Even though a time limit was not prescribed for the above tax exemption, it was argued that SEZ policy was predicated on tax relief and the subsequent change in policy was arbitrary and unfair. Individual taxpayers and undertakings should not be affected by subsequent laws if they make sizable investments, modify business models and bear the added expenses of moving into or developing a SEZ. It cannot be disputed that this argument is untenable keeping in mind that the legislature cannot be bound by past promises in line with practical considerations and their independence with regard to the effective discharge of public functions. It was held that the legislature cannot be bound by the doctrine of promissory estoppel [8].

The Adani group had also challenged the imposition of MAT in the Gujarat HC in 2011 on the ground that that any amendments to the SEZ Act can only be brought about by amendments to the SEZ Act itself, and not through the Finance Act [9]. The SC in Madurai District Central Cooperative Bank Ltd. [10] held that the parliament has the authority to introduce a new charge of tax even by incorporating it in any other statute other than the act. However, the fact remains that such policies lead to a volatile business environment and the importance of stable business policies cannot be overemphasized. In 2011, NASSCOM recommended that MAT be withdrawn as it is opposed to the government’s long term policy of SEZ’s growth [11]. Alternatively, it stated that the imposition of MAT be withdrawn to ensure the continued economic viability of the SEZs which have already been notified by the government [12]. It also stated that international norms should be applied for the determination of the MAT rate, which was 1/3rd of the corporate tax rates [13].

Another concern highlighted by other stakeholders was the prescribed period of ten years for the setting of the MAT against regular tax liability. This MAT credit may expire or be on the verge of expiration for participants in SEZs who enjoy tax holiday for a prescribed number of years when they start operations due to absence of initial tax liability. Foreign investors will face difficulties in claiming tax benefits in their home jurisdictions for MAT paid in India. Further, the exemption granted to SEZ developers as to the levy of Dividend Distribution Tax @ 15% has been revoked by the Finance Ministry in 2011 severely affecting the IT industry.

The government finally took note of the increased disinvestment as a consequence of such taxes and proposed to make the imposition of MAT and Dividend Distribution Tax inapplicable to SEZ’s in 2015 [14].

3. E-Commerce Industry

NASSCOM in 2012 suggested the lowering of the interchange tax rate on debit cards transactions by the RBI. Debit cards possess lower risk in comparison to credit cards, the transactions being concluded immediately and the same should be reflected in the form of differential taxes. A standard 1-2% interchange/transaction fees were generally levied by banks. NASSCOM also recommended the introduction of a 2% tax incentive on the purchase of products online to facilitate increased purchases and encourage consumers to even undertake small value transactions online. Further, it emphasized that the base of e-commerce users have to be expanded. It commented on the differences in the Internet usage costs between China and India, USD 10 and USD 15-20 respectively. High internet usage costs can only be indicative of reduced Internet access. However, this is not to state that the E-commerce industry is unsuited for India due to infrastructural inefficiencies. NASSCOM has stated that India as of 2012 possesses over 100 million Internet users. Technology has to be developed which would reduce dropout rates of transactions. Further it suggested the creation of an online receipt repository which would store all online transaction receipts, accessible through mobile phones or the internet. It would contribute in increasing customer confidence by enabling tracking of payment, delivery etc.

The RBI in response to the recommendations of NASSCOM and the Online Payment Advisory Group [15] and in consultation with all concerned stakeholders, decided to put a maximum limit on the Merchant Discount Rate (MDR) for transactions undertaken with a debit card [16].

4. Transfer Pricing Issues

Transfer Pricing has become the dominant international tax issue affecting multinational corporations operating in India [17]. As noted by NASSCOM, a steep rise in litigation and the number of transfer pricing adjustments with the Indian Revenue Authority (IRA) has been observed due to ‘increased scrutiny’ by the IRA who has been rejecting the profit declared by foreign companies accruing to Indian subsidiaries by applying very high markups in this sector. Increased complications in setting valid prices through this process have arisen due to the rising presence of ‘highly complex transactions’ involving intangibles and multi-tiered services across the world. The Finance Act 2012 extended the applicability of domestic party transactions to certain related domestic parties, if the aggregate value of such transactions exceeds INR 5 crore, to any expenditure with respect to which deduction is claimed while calculating profits and to transactions related to businesses eligible for profit-linked tax incentives, including SEZ units under section 10AA [18].

NASSCOM has proposed a three pronged approach to the problem of backlog of cases and absence of certainty of price of transactions:

Implementation of Safe Harbour provisions to resolve existing disputes.
Introduction of Advance Pricing Agreements [19] to set fair and transparent prices.
Initiation of review of the structure and procedure of the Dispute Resolution Panel [20].

The Finance Act 2009 introduced section 92CB [21] in the Income Tax Act 1961 which provided for the subjection of the arms length price determined under section 92C or section 92CA to Safe Harbour Rules, to be declared by the Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT). For the valid determination of such a transfer price, the minimum transfer price that a taxpayer is expected to earn for international transactions is prescribed along with certain specific norms for particular transactions. The safe harbour transfer price for eligible transactions is subject to certain prescribed minimum ceilings [22]. A price determined in accordance with such guidelines would be deemed to be an Arms Length Price (ALP). To that extent the safe Harbour Rules are in the nature of ‘presumptive taxation’ and incentivises IT firms to avoid unnecessary litigation by opting for the same. Unilateral, bilateral and multilateral Advance Pricing Agreements, binding on the taxpayer and the revenue authorities for five consecutive years have been introduced with effect from 1 July 2012. Certain domestic transactions are inapplicable for APA’s in the absence of other monetary conditions/stipulations under law for entering into an APA. Documentation on comparables is required to be maintained to substantiate compliance with arms length principle.

The concerns of the prescribed rates include non-representation of industry benchmarks and economic realities in as much as the prescribed rates exceed the actual arms length prices, often leading to the risk of double taxation in foreign jurisdictions. The division of IT services into two components has also been criticized as many of the activities might overlap. NASSCOM has stated that it is not clear how the existing current issues are proposed to be resolved. The introduction of domestic parties as applicable parties to be subject to the transfer pricing regulations will only increase the complexity in the law. There has been subsequent judicial development involving the establishment of some principles for the valid determination of comparables for the purpose of identifying an acceptable transfer price which will be discussed in the next blog post.

5. Other Recommendations

5.1. Concerns with the Union Budget Proposals

NASSCOM summarized that the Union Budget Proposals 2012-13 focus on the reduction of the fiscal deficit through higher taxation rather than expenditure management. More specifically, it focuses on the following concerns of the IT Industry:

The issues of tax simplification have not been resolved as no roadmap for the implementation of the Direct Taxes Code and the Goods and Services Tax Bill has been provided.
The increase in the Current Account Deficit should have incentivized the government to introduce measures which facilitate high value exports, which has been wholly ignored from the budget.
Increase in indirect taxes, namely excise duty and service tax is a retrograde policy measure.
Restrictive conditions in the SEZ Act 2005 which do not facilitate the setting up of small companies, have to be modified.
There is no mention of reduction of Tax Deducted at Source (TDS) for SMEs and introduction of non-profit linked incentives in the form of employment benefits etc. in the proposal.
Similar provisions should also be introduced for Tier II and III cities in the country.
Some announcements as to the simplification of service tax refund and the removal of the provisions involving dual levy of service tax and VAT are not sufficient to resolve ambiguities in law. NASSCOM, in light of the increasing delays of service tax, suggested exemption of export activity from such tax and the applicability of a simplified mechanism similar to CENVAT wherein exemption will be provided to exporters in proportion of their exports to total sales.

5.2. Request for Clarity in Classification of Transactions and Guidelines

NASSCOM in its pre-budget recommendations had suggested that in light of the confusion of the characterization of software as goods or services and the resultant dual taxation, in the form of taxes paid to both the Central and the State Governments, the provision of software, whether customized or packaged should be treated as a service irrespective of the media and mode of transfer with the assurance from the States that no VAT shall be leviable on software. Further, guidelines have to be outlined for various e-commerce transactions like database subscription, cloud computing, webhosting and data warehousing. Onsite exporter of services are being denied the benefits of certain tax exemptions due to the sunset of STPI provisions, thus forming the need for a formal clarification by the government deeming these activities to be an integral component of the IT services industry.

5.3. New Retrograde Obligations under Law

NASSCOM emphasized that the introduction of certain provisions, related to GAAR, related party transactions and the withholding of tax in the Finance Bill, some of these retrospective in nature, enhance the difficulties faced by the IT industry. Increased obligations on the corporate tax payers in the form of imposition of additional taxes will only increase the scope of multiple interpretations of the provisions which will lead to the exercise of discretionary powers by the tax authorities.

6. Endnotes

[1] As of September 2011, a significant majority of the 143 operational SEZs in the country belonged to the IT/ITeS and electronic hardware as per data released by the Ministry of Commerce and Industry.

[2] See: http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2012-02-25/news/31099874_1_sez-unit-sez-promoters-multi-product.

[3] Section 10AA of the Income Tax Act provides for 100% income tax exemption on export income for SEZ units for the first five years, 50% for the next five years and 50% of the ploughed back export profit for the next five years.

[4] See: http://www.business-standard.com/article/economy-policy/govt-imposes-18-5-mat-on-sez-developers-units-111022800153_1.html.

[5] See: http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2005-07-08/news/27506703_1_special-economic-zone-act-sez-act-sez-bill.

[6] (2013)260CTR(Kar)146.

[7] The doctrines of promissory estoppel and legitimate expectation, arising from legal relationships and reasonable expectation, respectively, are flexible equitable reliefs not defined in any statute. Judicial decisions have held that a party would not be entitled to go back on a clear and unequivocal promise which was intended to create legal relations, knowing or intending that it would be acted upon by the other party to whom the promise was made and acted upon by the other party under the doctrine of promissory estoppel. Legitimate expectation of a certain treatment arises against representation by an administrative authority, whether express (through promises), or implied (through consistent past practice) despite absence of any right otherwise.

[8] It was held that the action of the government is legal as every tax exemption provision should also incorporate a sunset clause. The deletion of the exemption under law would only reduce the erosion of the tax base.

[9] See: http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2011-05-11/news/29532409_1_sez-act-minimum-alternative-tax-mat.

[10] Madurai District Central Cooperative Bank Ltd. v. ITO (1975) 101 ITR 24(SC), the form and method of introduction of a legislation is not of importance provided the requirement of competence by the legislature to pass the deemed law with respect to its subject matter is satisfied. An amendment of a taxing statute, by an unconventional method of incorporation through an act of a different pith and substance is not unconstitutional. The primary purpose of the Finance Acts is to prescribe tax rates for taxes specified in the Income Tax Act. However, the above fact does not restrain the freedom of the legislature to impose an altogether new tax through the Finance Act or any other deemed legislation besides the Income Tax Act.

[11] See: http://www.nasscom.in/nasscom-prebudget-recommendations.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Ibid.

[14] See: http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2015-02-13/news/59119589_1_sez-developers-and-units-minimum-alternate-tax-special-economic-zones.

[15] Formed in 2012 to examine the challenges faced by the E-commerce Industry in India and to recommend changes needed to facilitate the creation of a vibrant online payment sector.

[16] Not exceeding 1 percent for transaction amount for value above 2,000. The directive was issued under section 18 of the Payments and Settlement Systems Act, with effect from July 1, 2012.

[17] See: http://www.pwc.com/gx/en/international-transfer-pricing/assets/india.pdf.

[18] This amendment would extend to any other transaction as may be specified and would be applicable for FY 2012-13 and subsequent years.

[19] An Advance Pricing Agreement, generally covering multiple years, entered into between a taxpayer and at least one tax authority lays down the method of transfer pricing to be applicable to the taxpayer’s inter-company transactions which eliminates the need for transfer pricing adjustments for enclosed transactions provided the terms of the agreement are complied with.

[20] The Finance Act 2009 inserted section 144C in the Income Tax Act which provides for the constitution of an alternative dispute resolution mechanism for transfer pricing taxation matters, namely a DRP (Dispute Resolution Panel) consisting of three commissioners rank officers.

[21] Section 92CB defines Safe Harbour to be ‘circumstances under which the income tax authorities shall accept the transfer pricing declared by the assessee.’ The procedure for adopting safe harbour, the transfer price to be adopted, the compliance procedure upon adoption of safe harbours and circumstances in which a safe harbour adopted may be held to be invalid is specified in the new rules in 10TA to 10AG issued by the CBDT on 18th September 2013.

[22]

Provision of software development services and information technology enabled services with insignificant risks- upto rs 500 crore- 20% or more on total operating costs, above rs 500 crore- 22% or more on total operating costs.
Provision of knowledge processes outsourcing services with insignificant risks-25% or more on total operating costs.
Provision of specified contract R & D services wholly or partly relating to software development with insignificant risks- 30% or more on total operating costs.

7. Author Profile

Pavishka Mittal is a law student at West Bengal National University of Juridical Sciences, Kolkata and has completed her second year. She takes contemporary dance very seriously and hopes to contribute to the dance community in India. Other than dancing, she indulges in binge-watching in her spare time.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/policy-shaping-in-the-indian-it-industry-recommendations-by-nasscom-2006-2012

Digital Humanities in India – Concluding Thoughts

sneha-pp — 2016-06-30T04:48:27Z

An extended survey of digital initiatives in arts and humanities practices in India was undertaken during the last year. Provocatively called 'mapping digital humanities in India', this enquiry began with the term 'digital humanities' itself, as a 'found' name for which one needs to excavate some meaning, context, and location in India at the present moment. Instead of importing this term to describe practices taking place in this country - especially when the term itself is relatively unstable and undefined even in the Anglo-American context - what I chose to do was to take a few steps back, and outline a few questions/conflicts that the digital practitioners in arts and humanities disciplines are grappling with. The final report of this study will be published serially. This is the final section.

Sections

01. Digital Humanities in India?

02. A Question of Digital Humanities

03. Reading from a Distance – Data as Text

04. The Infrastructure Turn in the Humanities

05. Living in the Archival Moment

06. New Modes and Sites of Humanities Practice

07. Digital Humanities in India – Concluding Thoughts

Concluding Thoughts

This exercise in mapping ‘digital humanities’ in India has brought to the fore several learnings and challenges, especially in trying to locate the domain of enquiry even as our understanding of what constitutes new objects, methods and forms of research and pedagogy constantly undergo change and redefinition. As some of the people interviewed in the course of this study remarked, DH, with its interdisciplinary approach and porous boundaries is like a moving target that becomes increasingly difficult to define as it is constantly evolving into something new, which then adds another dimension to what is already understood about the field. This is not to say that there is a consensus on what is DH, globally or in India, but just to emphasise that the object or domain of enquiry is not fixed, or demarcated clearly.

Even as I wrap up this study, some of the key questions or problems of definition, ontology and method remain with us, as the ‘field’ – if there is such a thing – is incipient in India, as with other parts of the world. What it does for us immediately is throw open several questions about how we understand the idea of the ‘digital’, and what may be new areas of enquiry for the humanities at large, post the advent of the digital. This study therefore is not interested in the question of whether there is a field called DH in India, but rather in what questions are raised by and for DH and DH-like projects by a range of practices and scholarship in the humanities post the digital.

We began with the understanding that DH is a new space of interdisciplinary research, scholarship and practice with several possibilities for thinking about the nature of the intersection of the humanities and technology. The term was a little more than a found term of sorts, in the context of this study, which since then has taken on various meanings and undergone some form of creative re-appropriation. The history of the term in the context of “humanities computing” in the Anglo-American context has helped in locating and defining the field globally within the ambit of certain kinds of practices and scholarship in the contemporary moment. In India, this has been relatively complex endeavour, given that DH, or engagements with humanities-after-digital and/or with digital-through-humanities come out of a different chequered history of humanities and technology. As most of the literature around DH even globally has pointed out, the problem with arriving at a definition is ontological, more than epistemological. The conditions of its emergence and existence are yet to be completely understood, although if one is to take into account the larger history of science and technology studies or the more recent cyber culture and digital culture studies, these ‘epistemic shifts’ have been in the making for some time now. In India particularly, where a clear picture of the ‘field’ as such is still to emerge in the form of a theorisation of its key concerns, it is only through a practice-mapping that one may locate what are at best certain discursive shifts in the way we understand content, structures and methods in the humanities, within the context of the digital. These changes may be visible across only a few domains – particularly in the multi-layered technological landscape in India, and lack a wider consensus in terms of whether they really constitute a larger epistemic shift or new direction of thought. The first couple of chapters in this report tried to lay out ways of understanding the current state of ‘digitality’ that India is in, and the lack of an indigenous framework to theorise or understand it better. The layered technological and media landscape that we inhabit today, where both the analogue and digital co-exist serving various purposes, and access and usage are still contentious points of debate, provides an interesting and dynamic context to understand what are new practices of humanities research and scholarship today.

The fundamental premise of the nature of the digital and its relation to the human subject still lacks adequate exploration which would be required to define the contours of the field. The inherited separation of humanities and technology further makes this a complex space to negotiate, when the term may now actually indicate the need to decode the rather tenuous relationship between the two supposedly separate domains. If one may locate the question even earlier, the separation of the natural and social sciences lies above this segregation of disciplines, and needs further exploration. There is a need therefore to understand the growth of a ‘technologised’ history of humanities to examine whether this almost forced coming together of two historically separated domains may in itself be something novel, or create new and qualitatively different kinds of practices for humanities. Even so, the disciplinary contexts of the usage of the term DH in India open up certain questions of ontology and method more broadly for humanities research and practice in the digital space. These include changes in the nature of cultural artifacts brought about by digitisation, in a landscape where the analogue and digital co-exist but also are in a state of transition from the first to the second. One example is the digitisation of objects like film posters, lobby cards and other paraphernalia around a film text, which although analogue objects, can now be layered onto a digital film object in online archivel like Indiancine.ma, thus also changing the object or opening it up for more questions. The digital object or image, is a new object of study that also demands a different kind of analysis. The change in the nature of the archival object and the challenges to archival practice are some of the related questions stemming from this context. As mentioned by Dr. Indira Chowdhury in the chapter on archival practice, oral history archives and the practice of creating and maintaining them is fraught with many challenges because of a change in the archival object itself. A digital audio file has its own protocols of storage, retrieval and use, given the problems of format and technological obsolescence. Further the classification of such files, its copies in different formats, and their preservation also demands changes in archival practice. This points to some of the larger challenges that have emerged for archival practice in India today, which include – storage and preservation of materials, cross-referencing and meta-data standards, conditions and structures of access, roles and forms of curation, re-usage of archival materials in research and pedagogy, and the constraints to digitization of archival materials, particularly in terms of rare materials and those in Indian languages. The challenge of working with materials in Indian languages (see section on Data as Text) are several, and will form one of the significant areas of work in DH.

The question of methodology comes in as the next most important aspect here, as the method of DH is yet to be clearly defined. The proliferation of new disciplines and conflict over methodology is not new, the Gulbenkian Commission report published in 1996 titled ‘Open the Social Sciences’ documents some of these and other concerns with the growth and segregation of disciplines, and the debates it generated both internally, seen in the rise of cultural studies, and in the natural sciences as complexity studies as well (Wallerstein et al 1996). At present DH seems to be a combination and creative appropriation of methodologies drawn from different disciplines and creative practices. The change in the methodology of the humanities and social sciences itself as no longer remaining discipline-specific has been a contributory factor to the evolving methodology of DH as well. This has raised several methodological questions, as outlined by some of the people interviewed in the study. The foremost is the challenge in rethinking the notion of the text as a digitally mediated object, and the blurring of boundaries between film, audio and print and archival materials as they are transformed into digital objects. The existing methods of reading these texts then are inadequate. An example is the Bichitra variorum at Jadavpur University, or online archives like Indiancine.ma or Pad.ma, where you need new tools to navigate the vast corpus of material on these platforms, and to work with them. The notion of text and textual analysis also demands some rethinking in the light of new terms such as ‘distant reading’ that have come up in the DH discourse. Bichitra and Pad.ma or Indiancine.ma would facilitate some form of such ‘distant reading’ as they involve a method of reading the print or film text using a large number of texts, something possible only with a computer, but also with other kinds of ancillary material, like marginalia, errata, posters, pamphlets and lobby cards of a film. This brings up not just new ways of contextualizing the digital object, but also asking questions of it in terms of its material aspects. Working with collaborative online archives, while creating a new analytical and creative space for work using different kinds of film and film-related material, also pose questions of authorship and privacy. The lack of better transcription tools and other methods to work with sound in the digital space, has posed significant methodological challenges in oral history work as well, as outlined in earlier sections of this report.

The use of computational methods for humanities research is one of the important shifts that forms part of the growth of DH in India, although there is very little work being done in this area in academic spaces except for a few institutions. The Tagore variorum and the online film archives Indiacine.ma and Pad.ma are two examples in this study that have done some work with computational tools and a large corpus of material. The collation guide in Bichitra, and the use of different tools and filters in the film archives like Pad.ma and Indiancine.ma have been able to add another dimension to the analysis of humanities texts, but whether they help ask any qualitatively new questions still remains open to debate. The other spaces studied as part of this report, such as work on digitisation and archives at the School of Cultural Texts, Centre for Public History, or SPARROW, or media art work at CAMP, have been more engaged with exploring what the digital turn has meant for certain humanities research. Some of the more recent courses offered in DH, such as the master’s programme at Srishti School of Art Design and Technology, and the certificate course at University of Pune, do engage with some form of building or ‘material making’, by offering workshops and some practical sessions, as well as topics like data mining, and textual computing. As such the skills and infrastructure needed to work with large data sets and new technologised processes of interpretation and visualisation still remain outside the ambit of the mainstream humanities. Through an exploration of allied fields such as media, archival practice, design and education technology, the study tries to locate how certain practices in these areas inform what we understand of DH today.

The archive, media and now to a certain extent art and design have become the sites for most of the discussions around DH in India, primarily because of the nature of institutions and people who have engaged with the question so far. Archival practice has seen a vast change with the onset of digitisation, and the growth of more public and collaborative archival spaces will also bring forth new questions and concepts around the nature of the archive and its imagination as a dynamic space of knowledge production. The Centre for Public History at the Srishti School focuses on some of these questions, by trying to build more collaborative, online and public archival spaces, and involving in the process a rather diverse group of practitioners and researchers. The objective is also to make not only archives, but history, and oral histories as a discipline more accessible, and dynamic. he notion of the archive as a metaphor, and the possibility of looking at the archive as a database are some new questions which would inform the growth of DH in India. The growth of an open, distributive and collaborative archive, such as Indiancine.ma and Pad.ma also asks questions about the changes in film as an archival object, in its transition to the digital space. The availability of the film text for study, and the layering of different kinds of ancillary material around the film, such as posters, advertisements, literature and errata, opens up possibilities of reading the film text differently. At a more abstract level, the nature of the text as an unstable object itself, now increasingly being mediated and negotiated in different ways through digital spaces, tools and methods would be one way of locating an object of enquiry in DH and tracing its connection to the humanities, which are essentially still seen as ‘text-based disciplines’.

What has been a definite shift is the emphasis on process which has become an important point of enquiry, and one of the many axes around which DH is constructed. The rethinking of existing processes of knowledge production, including traditional methods of teaching-learning, and the emergence of new tools and methods such as visualisation, data mapping, distant reading and design-thinking at a larger level would be some of the interesting prospects of enquiry in the field. Though there is little conversation in the above areas in DH in India (even among the institutions and people mentioned in this study), and some work in other fields like the natural sciences, media and communication, its seems to not be part of the larger discourse developing around DH yet. The collation tool developed for the Tagore variorum, or the editing and annotation tools used in Indiancine.ma and Pad.ma are some examples of the tools and methods presently used in what could be DH or DH-like work in India. The method of DH is however, necessarily collaborative and distributed at the same time, as evidenced by its practice in these various areas and disciplines. A lot of the work done on both these platforms has been through collaboration among people across diverse domains of expertise, in the arts and humanities and technological fields. As the description of the variorum suggests, it needed the expertise of people from Computer Science, Library and Information Sciences, English and Bengali departments to set up such a platform. The method of using or working with Indiancine.ma and Pad.ma is necessarily collaborative and distributed, because everything from the primary film material to the annotations and editing is in some way user-generated, as the archive itself is open to different groups of people ranging from the film enthusiast to the film studies scholar.

The complex and somewhere problematic history of science and technology in India and the growth of the IT sector also forms part of this context, and will inform the manner in which DH grows as a concept, area of enquiry or even as a discipline. DH is yet another manifestation of changes that we have seen in the existing objects, processes, spaces and figures of learning, particularly the open, collaborative and participatory nature of knowledge production and dissemination that has come about with the advent of internet and digital technologies. More importantly, they also point towards the larger changes in what were earlier considered unifying notions for the university, and the humanities as disciplines founded on the ideas of reason and culture. The idea proposed by Bill Readings that the university is no longer concerned with the production of a radical or liberal subject is also an important one, as it points to a further question of the nature of the subject produced, and who the process of knowledge production is to be aimed at (Readings 1997). If one may extend this argument to DH, the subject of this new discourse around the digital is also now rather unclear.

One could explore the notion of the 'digital humanist,' or in a more abstract manner the digital subject as one example of this lack of clarity, which is also why it has been of much concern for several scholars, DH and otherwise. As Prof. Amlan Dasgupta says, it is difficult to identify such a category of scholars, although a person who is able to situate his work in the digital space with the same kind of ease and confidence that people of a different generation could do in manuscripts and books would perhaps fit this description, and he is sure that such a person may be found. For example someone who knows Shakespeare well and can write a programme, and he is sure a day will come when this is a possibility. It is a familiarity in which the inherent distance between these two pursuits becomes lesser – DH is at that moment - a composite of these two approaches rather than the difference. While many scholars concur with this explanation, others find the term misleading – humanities scholars do not call themselves ‘humanists’. Also, by virtue of being a digital subject, anybody engaged with some form of digital practice is already a digital humanist of some sort. The problem also is in the rather unclear nature of the practice, all of which is not unanimously identified as DH, as a result of which not many scholars would want to identify with the term. This poses another question about the skills required of a humanities scholar in the near future, will she have to learn how to code etc. Additionally there is also a concern, as pointed out by some scholars, about the loss of criticality as a result of a relying on algorithms to work with a corpus of texts, among other things.

However, many of these alternate or liminal spaces have always existed; they are perhaps becoming more visible and acknowledged now. This is also indicative of the larger changes in the landscape of work in the humanities, whether creative, academic or pedagogic. With the advent of the internet and new digital technologies, the nature of cultural artifacts has also been altered significantly, thus demanding a new mode of enquiry and analysis, which often goes beyond interpretation and representation. How these digital objects are constituted, are they ever complete or finished, such as the text in the variorum or the film in the archive which continue to take on layer upon layer of annotation to generate a plethora of meanings, are related questions. They pose a challenge to the existing methods of the humanities, and along with the distributed, collaborative, and networked structures of practice and research that the internet has engendered, they have opened up several possibilities for the humanities. DH, with its emphasis on interdisciplinarity and different kinds of knowledge drawn from a diverse set of practices definitely opens up space for a new mode of questioning; whether all of these different modes of questioning can coalesce as a new discipline or interdisciplinary field in itself will remain to be seen.

More importantly, it also indicates the changes taking place in the university system in India, which is trying to address multiple anxieties at a larger political and the every-day administrative levels, reflected in problems with quality, equity and access to education (Misra and Singh 2015; Academics for Creative Reforms 2015). The digital turn has been one of the sources of concern, as it has pushed for the need to rethink the role of technology, particularly internet, in teaching and learning practices, both within and outside the classroom. The internet, and the different challenges posed by it in terms of methods, objects and contexts of learning, has contributed greatly to the emergence of some of the digital practices discussed in this study, which also take some of the questions they pose about knowledge production, pedagogy or scholarship, outside the ambit of the classroom or university space. The emergence of DH can be seen as a coming together of these anxieties in some manner, and perhaps indicative of a distinct ontological basis for such a discipline or area of study in India. This is not to conflate the discourse with the narrative of a ‘crisis’ in the university (something that exists in the Anglo-American context of DH) but rather to highlight the changes that it is undergoing, where the internet and digital technologies continue to play a crucial role. In the absence of a history or established traditions for the growth of disciplines like media studies, software/internet studies or digital cultural studies in India, apart from the work done by research programmes like the Sarai programme at CSDS, it is imperative to ask if the emergence of DH is then a push to trace such a history, to understand better its ontological and political stake, and more importantly to explore what the ‘digital’ means not just for the humanities, but for a larger processes of knowledge production today.

References

Academics for Creative Reforms ‘What Is To Be Done About Indian Universities? In Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 50, Issue No. 24, 13 Jun, 2015.

Misra, Rajesh and Supriya Singh ‘Continuum of Ignorance in Indian Universities’ in Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 50, Issue No. 48, 28 Nov, 2015

Readings, Bill. The University in Ruins. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997

Wallerstein, Immanuel et al. Open the Social Sciences: Report of the Gulbenkian Commission on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences. California: Stanford University Press, 1996, http://www.binghamton.edu/fbc/archive/iwstanfo.htm.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities-in-india-concluding-thoughts

Creativity, Politics, and Internet Censorship

sneha-pp — 2016-06-17T07:07:40Z

In collaboration with Karnataka for Kashmir, we organised a discussion on 'Creativity, Politics and Internet Censorship' on May 25, 2016. Mahum Shabir, a legal activist and artist, Mir Suhail, political cartoonist with Kashmir Reader and Rising Kashmir, and Habeel Iqbal, a lawyer who has worked with several justice groups in Kashmir, shared some of their work and experiences. This discussion was organised as part of Port of Kashmir 2016, a series of events bringing together a small collective of people using different modes of art and activism to address crucial challenges to free speech and democracy in the state.

Mahum Shabir talking about the Handwara case. Source: Swar Thounaojam.

The discussion began with Mahum Shabir giving an overview of the work at the Jammu Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society, specifically on the Handwara case. She spoke of the role of the internet, and social media in particular, in perpetuating the gaze of the state, while also bringing up the larger question of how media propagates a certain way of looking at Kashmir, particularly women, marginalised groups and victims of violence. Internet blockades and media censorship pose several obstacles for the circulation of information, resulting in the need for surreptitious ways of communication as a necessary way to counter predominant narratives in the discourse around occupation. The implications of these for the rights of women in particular, the curbs on freedom at different levels, and the undercurrent of violence that is prevalent in everyday life, came up as significant questions.

Mir Suhail presented some of his cartoons, and shared some poignant personal experiences of growing up in a state under military occupation. His works reflect his concerns about a changing society, from understanding strife as an almost normalised state of existence, to now a phase of industrialization and control of resources. He spoke on the politics of exercising creative freedom in the present, and his attempt to encourage conversations on contemporary issues through his art. The role of technology in facilitating these conversations is as crucial as it is contentious, for it also brings up questions of surveillance and privacy;his art tries to navigate through some of these questions in different ways.

Habeel Iqbal, a lawyer who has worked on the Shopian and Handwara cases, spoke on some of the legal aspects of censorship and surveillance related issues in Kashmir, particularly in instances involving social media. He discussed some of the challenges faced by activists, social workers and political groups in working on certain cases, particularly in gathering and circulating information or in writing about sensitive issues. Self-censorship is often the only option for people working on these issues, as he elaborated through some personal experiences.

The discussion included questions on the possibilities opened up by privacy tools, such the use of encryption and to the extent to which they affect communication. Access to these technologies is a factor here; besides, transparency is also a goal for most human rights organisations working in the state. Social media, and social messaging apps in particular often function as an alternative to mainstream media as a means of communication, and it is interesting to see the questions it opens up for censorship. Examples of activism using not just the internet, but the network (through USBs and hard drives) were also discussed. The responses to such forms of activism, from across the world were interesting to engage with, as it tries to tackle predominant perceptions about the state. The economic aspects of different strategies of censorship and surveillance, through curfews and blockades and its broader implications for socio-economic development in the state were also discussed. The talk provided several insights into the problems and challenges to freedom of speech, the censorship of ideas, and its repercussions for creative freedom and politics in Kashmir.

Postcards of cartoons by Mir Suhail. Source: Swar Thounaojam.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/creativity-politics-and-internet-censorship-20160525

Comments on the RBI's Consultation Paper on Peer to Peer Lending

sumandro — 2016-06-01T20:21:13Z

The Reserve Bank of India published a Consultation Paper on Peer to Peer Lending on April 28, 2016, and invited comments from the public. CIS submitted the following response, authored by Elonnai Hickok, Pavishka Mittal, Sumandro Chattapadhyay, Vidushi Marda, and Vipul Kharbanda.

1. Preliminary

1.1. This submission presents comments and recommendations by the Centre for Internet and Society (“CIS”) on the Consultation Paper on Peer to Peer Lending (“the consultation paper”) by the Reserve Bank of India (“RBI”) [1].

2. The Centre for Internet and Society

2.1. The Centre for Internet and Society, CIS [2], is a non-profit organisation that undertakes interdisciplinary research on internet and digital technologies from policy and academic perspectives. The areas of focus include digital accessibility for persons with diverse abilities, access to knowledge, intellectual property rights, openness (including open data, free and open source software, open standards, open access, open educational resources, and open video), internet governance, telecommunication reform, digital privacy, and cyber-security. The academic research at CIS seeks to understand the reconfiguration of social processes and structures through the internet and digital media technologies, and vice versa.

2.2. This submission is consistent with CIS’ commitment to safeguarding general public interest, and the interests and rights of various stakeholders involved. The comments in this submission aim to further the concerns of citizens’ and users’ rights in the context of products, services, and transactions facilitated by digital media technologies, the , the principle that regulation should be defined around functions of the acts concerned, and not the technologies of delivery. Our comments are limited to the clauses that most directly have an impact on these concerns.

3. Response

3.1. Whether there is a felt need for regulating peer to peer lending platforms?

3.1.1. Peer to peer (“P2P”) lenders are platforms serving as marketplaces for the lenders and the borrowers of funds to connect. Their very business model does not render them as a provider of finance, as they aspire to function as pure intermediaries to enable lending and borrowing.

3.1.2. The Section 45I.(f)(iii) of the RBI Act, 1935 [3], provides RBI the authority to classify any financial institution as a non-banking financial company (“NBFC”) “with the previous approval of the Central Government and by notification in the Official Gazette.” Since the P2P lending platforms do not provide any finance themselves, undertake acquisition of financial instruments, deliver financial and/or insurance services, or collect financial resources directly, the only ground for classifying such companies as “financial institutions” [4] appears to be their involvement in “managing, conducting or supervising, as foreman, agent or in any other capacity, of chits or kuries as defined in any law which is for the time being in force in any State, or any business, which is similar thereto” [5]. P2P lending platforms can be considered to be brokers and thus there are other aspects that merit scrutiny such as antitrust issues, obligations of either party, company activities and the transactional system involved, as we will discuss in this document.

3.1.3. The consultation paper itself states that the balance sheet of the platform cannot indicate any borrowing / lending activity, which entails that the platform cannot itself provide finance or receive any funds for the provision of loans to others. Platforms are not allowed to determine the interest rates as they are not a party to the transaction. Neither would they be liable in cases of default by the borrower. These rules, standard for P2P platforms in other jurisdictions as well, confirm the assumption that the platform itself is not providing finance and thus, cannot be entrusted with any liability, obligation from the transaction.

3.1.4. Further, with RBI raising the threshold asset size for an NBFC to be considered systemically important (NBFC-ND-SI) from Rs. 100 Crores to Rs. 500 Crores [6], and Economic Times reporting that one of the biggest Indian P2P lending platform’s enterprise valuation (which can be taken as indicative of its net assets) is Rs 50 Crores [7], we may assume that most P2P lending platforms will have net assets worth less than 500 crore, at least in the near future; although there is a possibility for exponential growth with some companies.

3.1.5. Given the limited sphere of operation, restricted ability (by design) of these platforms to shape interest rates and other features of financial instruments, and their generally non-systemically-important nature, we would submit that the regulation of such P2P lending platforms are kept to an absolute minimum, so that their economic viability is not undermined, and at the same time the key risks associated with their operations are addressed by RBI.

3.2. Is the assessment of P2P lending and risks associated with it adequate?

3.2.1. CIS observes that the following are the key risks involved with the operations of the P2P lending platforms, and these are being respectively addressed by, or can be addressed by RBI in the following manners.

Insufficient information about the conditions of lending, leading to defrauding of the borrower: The borrower may not receive appropriate information about the terms of the loan, and/or the P2P lending platform may not act in a “fair” manner (say, in case of collusion between the P2P lending platform and the lender, or the lending platform and the borrower), which may lead to defrauding and/or economic loss of either party. By classifying P2P lending platforms as NBFCs, RBI will ensure that these companies follow the Guidelines on Fair Practices Code for NBFCs [8], which extensively addresses concerns related to this type of risks.
Insufficient information about the borrower, or her/his ability to repay the loan, may lead to non-repayment and economic loss of the lender: If the P2P lending platform allows the lender to offer loans to borrowers without acquiring and/or providing sufficient information to the lender about the borrower’s credit history and/or ability to repay the loan, modes of formulating security for loans, this may heighten the risks of non-repayment of loans. By classifying P2P lending platforms as NBFCs, RBI will ensure that these companies follow the Master Circular – 'Know Your Customer' (KYC) Guidelines – Anti Money Laundering Standards (AML) - Prevention of Money Laundering Act, 2002 - Obligations of NBFCs [9], which extensively addresses concerns related to this type of risks.
Credit-related information of the lenders and the borrowers collected by P2P lending platforms may not be made available to other financial institutions and that will lead asymmetry in credit information available across various actors in the sector: Credit information, related to both lending and borrowing practices of entities using the platform concerned, is a key asset of the P2P lending platforms. Lack of sharing of such information with Credit Information Companies, for economic reasons or otherwise, may however, lead to information asymmetry within the financial sector, which will structurally weaken the entire sector (with pieces of credit information being distributed across actors and not being shared internally). By classifying P2P lending platforms as NBFCs, RBI will ensure that these companies follow the Credit Information Companies (Regulation) Act, 2005 [10], which extensively addresses concerns related to this type of risks.
P2P lending platforms diversifying their financial operations without informing RBI and hence without appropriate regulatory control: It is possible that P2P lending platforms may decide to diversify their activities. There have been similar examples in other related sectors, say e-commerce marketplaces, that have started their own product re/selling companies that use the same online marketplace concerned. By classifying P2P lending platforms as NBFCs, RBI will ensure that these companies provide RBI with detailed and regular reports of their economic activities and investments, which is expected to address concerns related to this type of risks.

3.3. Are there any other risks which ought to be addressed?

3.3.1. CIS observes that as part of the usual transaction related activities of the P2P lending platforms, the companies will come into possession of what has been defined as “sensitive personal data or information” by the Information Technology (Reasonable security practices and procedures and sensitive personal data or information) Rules, 2011 [11]. The concerns related to this type of risk is directly addressed by the Rules concerned, and may not require additional attention from the RBI.

3.3.2. CIS observes that as borrowers and lenders start using specific P2P lending platforms, the data regarding their credit histories and/or “financial reputation” will be owned by these companies. While such information might be shared internally within the financial sector through the Credit Information Companies, the borrowers and lenders themselves may not get direct access to such data. Hence, the borrowers and lenders will not be able to move easily and smoothly to a new P2P lending platform and make use of their existing credit information and/or “financial reputation” when accessing services offered via the new P2P lending platform. In other words, the borrowers and lenders may face a service provider lock-in, and inability to move between P2P lending platforms easily, without explicit access to their own credit history/reputation, and will not have the ability to migrate such information from one P2P lending platform to another (or to any other agency, for that matter). CIS submits that RBI must provide a mechanism to allow users to migrate between platforms as it has not been discussed in the consultation paper.

3.4. Is the proposed approach to regulating these platforms adequate?

3.4.1. CIS observes that while classification of P2P lending platforms will appropriately address key risks associated with their operations (as listed in 3.2.1. A-D), it will not address a major risk emerging out of their operations that is unique to the technological basis of the business concerned (as mentioned in 3.3.2.), and further, it will impose substantial financial and management obligations that have a very high probability of undermining the economic viability of this emerging and niche sector of intermediated direct lending and borrowing.

3.4.2. CIS observes that these financial and management obligations may involve the following topics among others discussed: 1) minimum net worth requirement for registration, 2) minimum investments required to be made government securities, 3) transferring of minimum percentage of net profits to RBI, 4) guidelines regarding corporate governance [12], etc.

3.4.3. Given this, CIS submits that instead of classifying P2P lending platforms as “Misc NBFCs,” a new sub-classification is created under the category of NBFC for such platforms, that directly addresses the key risks associated with businesses of P2P lending platforms, and protects lenders as well as borrowers while enhancing transparency in operations. This new sub-classification of P2P lending companies should also be divided into systemically-important and non-systemically-important like other NBFCs, and requirements regarding financial operations and corporate management should only be enforced for the former category of P2P lending companies.

3.5. Any other relevant issues pertaining to P2P lending

Beyond the issues already discussed above, CIS seek clarity from the RBI around the following aspects:

Transactional system pertaining to P2P lending:
1. What are the requirements and prerequisites for mandating the collection of user identity?
2. Establishing a maximum sum that can be transferred per transaction.
Company activities:
1. Fees that can be charged by platforms.
2. How data security can be best addressed.
3. How the financial transactions are brokered.
4. Modes of redressal.
5. Restitution to users if something goes amiss in the transaction.
6. Insurance that the company has to buy or capital on hand to support.

Endnotes

[1] See: https://www.rbi.org.in/scripts/bs_viewcontent.aspx?Id=3164.

[2] See: http://cis-india.org/.

[3] See: https://rbidocs.rbi.org.in/rdocs/Publications/PDFs/RBIA1934170510.pdf.

[4] See Section 45I.(c) of RBI Act, 1923, last amended on January 07, 2013.

[5] See Section 45I.(c)(v) of RBI Act, 1923, last amended on January 07, 2013.

[6] See: https://rbidocs.rbi.org.in/rdocs/content/pdfs/PNNBFC200315.pdf.

[7] See: http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/small-biz/startups/faircent-com-raises-pre-series-a-funding-of-250k/articleshow/47630279.cms.

[8] See: https://rbi.org.in/scripts/NotificationUser.aspx?Id=7866.

[9] See: https://rbi.org.in/scripts/BS_ViewMasCirculardetails.aspx?id=8168.

[10] See: http://www.incometaxindia.gov.in/Pages/acts/credit-information-companies-act.aspx.

[11] See: http://deity.gov.in/sites/upload_files/dit/files/GSR313E_10511%281%29.pdf.

[12] See: https://www.rbi.org.in/scripts/BS_NBFCNotificationView.aspx?Id=3706.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/comments-on-the-rbi-consultation-paper-on-peer-to-peer-lending

RBI Consultation Paper on P2P Lending: Data Security and Privacy Concerns

vipul — 2016-06-01T11:41:17Z

On April 28, 2016 the Reserve Bank of India published a consultation paper on P2P Lending and invited comments from the public on the same. The Paper discusses what P2P lending is, the various regulatory practices that govern P2P lending in different jurisdictions and lists our arguments for and against regulating P2P lending platforms.

Arguments against Regulation

The arguments against regulation of P2p lending companies as set out in the paper are (briefly):

Regulating an exempt or nascent sector may be perceived as rubber stamping the industry through regulation, thus lending credibility to the P2P lending which could attract ill informed lenders to the sector who may not understand all the risks associated with the industry. In this way Regulation may cause more harm than good.
Regulations may also be perceived as too stringent, thus stifling the growth of an innovative, efficient and accessible industry.
The P2P lending market is currently in a nascent stage and does not pose an immediate systemic risk meriting regulation.

Arguments in favour of Regulation

The arguments for regulating the market on the other hand are:

Considering the significance of the online industry and the impact which it can have on the traditional banking channels/NBFC sector, it would be prudent to regulate this emerging industry.
The, the importance of these methods of financing, specially in sectors where formal lending cannot reach, needs to be acknowledged.
If the sector is left unregulated altogether, there is the risk of unhealthy practices being adopted by one or more players, which may have deleterious consequences.
Section 45S of RBI Act prohibits an individual or a firm or an unincorporated association of individuals from accepting deposits “if its business wholly or partly includes any of the activities specified in clause (c) of section 45-I (i.e. activities of a financial institution); or if his or its principal business is that of receiving of deposits under any scheme or arrangement or in any other manner, or lending in any manner. Contravention of Section 45S is an offence punishable under section 58B (5A) of RBI Act. As per the Act, ‘‘deposit’’ includes and shall be deemed always to have included any receipt of money by way of deposit or loan or in any other form, but does not include any amount received from an individual or a firm or an association of individuals not being a body corporate, registered under any enactment relating to money lending which is for the time being in force in any State. Since the borrowers and lenders brought together by a P2P platform could fall within these prohibitions, absence of regulation may lead to perpetrating an illegality.”

After listing out the arguments, the paper adopts the approach of regulating this industry and proposes to bring P2P lending platforms under the purview of RBI’s regulation by defining them as Non Banking Financial Companies (NBFCs) under section 45-I(f)(iii) of the RBI Act. Once notified as NBFCs, RBI can issue regulations under sections 45JA and 45L. Though there is scope to comment on many aspects of the consultation paper our comments here will be limited to the data security and privacy aspects of the recommendations.

Data Security and Privacy Concerns

While the understanding of potential borrowers, specially those who have had experiences with commercial financial institutions, is that the more amount of information they provide, the better their chances become of getting a loan. This perception emanates from the fact that any potential borrower is asked for a myriad of documents, including personally identifying documents before a request for a loan is considered, infact for almost all financial institutions it is part of their core prudential norms to ask for identity documents before disbursing a loan. Getting as much information as possible from the borrower is not just a quirk of the financial institutions but it makes business sense for them, since it is those institutions who bear the risk of recovery of their money. There is no reason why the same logic or allowing creditors all the information about the borrower should not be applicable to P2P lending platforms, as far as the principle of prudential business practices is concerned. However, the key difference between disclosing information to P2P lending platforms as opposed to financial institutions is that whilst the information supplied to financial institutions stays limited to the institution and its employees, a large amount of the information (though not necessarily all) given to P2P platforms is made available to all potential creditors, which in P2P lending translates to any internet user who registers as a potential creditor. In this way the potential for the information to reach a wider group of people is much higher and therefore privacy and data security risks require special attention in P2P lending.

In section 5.3(v) of the Paper it is recommended that “Confidentiality of the customer data and data security would be the responsibility of the Platform. Transparency in operations, adequate measures for data confidentiality and minimum disclosures to borrowers and lenders would also be mandated through a fair practices code.” Whilst the fair practices code has not yet been developed or at least not yet made publicly available, as companies in the P2P lending industry are body corporates, these fair practice codes should be in line with and satisfy the requirements of section 43A of the Information Technology Act, 2000 (“IT Act”) as well as the Guidelines issued by the RBI’s Guidelines on Information security, Electronic Banking, Technology risk management and cyber frauds [1].

The minimum standards for data protection in Indian law have been laid down by section 43A of the IT Act and the Information Technology (Reasonable security practices and procedures and sensitive personal data or information) Rules, 2011 (“Rules”) issued under section 43A. As per Rule 4 of the Rules P2P platforms would be required to have a privacy policy to deal with sensitive personal data, which includes any details regarding financial information such bank account, credit/debit cards, etc [2].

This policy would have to be published on the website of the platforms and would provide for a number of things such as (i) Clear and easily accessible statements of its practices and policies; (ii) type of personal or sensitive personal data or information collected; (iii) purpose of collection and usage of such information; (iv) disclosure of information including sensitive personal data or information; (v) reasonable security practices and procedures for the data. The other requirements of the Rules as regards consent before usage of the information, collection limitations, imparting information/notice to the consumer (information provider), retention limitation, purpose limitation, opt-out option, disclosure, etc. will also be applicable to P2P platforms and the fair practices code that the RBI would issue for this purpose will have to take all these issues into account.

The Rules also provide that body corporates will be considered to have complied with reasonable security practices if they have implemented such security practices and standards and have a comprehensive documented information security programme and information security policies that contain managerial, technical, operational and physical security control measures that are commensurate with the information assets being protected with the nature of business. Although there are no such practices which have been endorsed by any governmental body for P2P lending platforms, however the Department of Banking Supervision, Reserve Bank of India, has issued guidelines on “Information security, Electronic Banking, Technology risk management and cyber frauds" [3]. which could be relied upon until a fair practices code is put into place. The major privacy and data security provisions of these guidelines are given below:

Security Baselines: The guidelines require banks to be proactive in identifying and specifying the minimum security baselines to be adhered to by the service providers to ensure confidentiality and security of data;
Back up records: A cloud computing system must ensure backup of all its clients' information;
Security steps: An institution may take the following steps to ensure that risks with respect to confidentiality and security of data are adequately mitigated: (i) Address, agree, and document specific responsibilities of the respective parties in outsourcing; (ii) Discuss and agree on the instances where customer data shall be accessed; (iii) Ensure that service provider employees are adequately aware and informed on the security and privacy policies.
Confidentiality: Agreements should provide for maintaining confidentiality of customer's information even after the contract expires or is terminated by either party and specify the liability in case of security breach or leakage.
Encryption: Normally, a minimum of 128-bit SSL encryption is expected. Banks should only select encryption algorithms which are well established international standards.
Fraud Risk Management: It is also necessary that customer confidential information and other data/information available with banks is secured adequately to ensure that fraudsters do not access it to perpetrate fraudulent transactions.

Although inclusion of the above principles in the fair practices code would be helpful, however since the workings of P2P platforms are quite unique, therefore it would be counterproductive to restrict the security and privacy protocols to only those applied to regular banking transactions and the fair practices code should take into account these unique problems of P2P lending rather than seek to apply the existing norms blindly.

Endnotes

[1] See: https://rbidocs.rbi.org.in/rdocs/content/PDFs/GBS300411F.pdf.

[2] The Rules define “sensitive personal data or information” as information relating to: "(i) password, (ii) financial information such as Bank account or credit card or debit card or other payment instrument details, (iii) physical, physiological and mental health condition, (iv) sexual orientation, (v) medical records and history, (vi) Biometric information, (vii) any detail relating to the above clauses as provided to body corporate for providing service, and (viii) any of the information received under above clauses by body corporate for processing, stored or processed under lawful contract or otherwise."

[3] See: http://rbidocs.rbi.org.in/rdocs/content/PDFs/GBS300411F.pdf.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/rbi-consultation-paper-on-p2p-lending

RBI Consultation Paper on P2P Lending: Legality and Implications

Pavishka Mittal — 2016-05-31T13:25:37Z

The Reserve Bank of India published a Consultation Paper on Peer-to-Peer Lending on April 28, 2016. The Paper proposes to bring the P2P lending platforms under the purview of RBI’s regulation by defining P2P platforms as NBFCs under section 45I(f)(iii) of the RBI Act. Once notified as NBFCs, RBI can issue regulations under sections 45JA and 45L. The last date for submission of comments to the Consultation Paper is May 31, 2016. In this post, Pavishka Mittal discusses the legality and implications of the proposed classification of Peer-to-Peer lending companies as NBFCs.

1. Introduction

2. Legal Basis for Classifying P2P Lending Platforms as NBFCs

3. Legal Implications of Classifying P2P Lending Platforms as NBFCs

3.1. Threshold Mechanism under Indian Law

3.2. Change in Management or Control of NBFCs

3.3. Compliance with KYC/AML/CFT Norms

3.4. Compliance with Guidelines on Fair Practices Code for NBFCs

3.5. Obligations to Share Credit Information

4. Endnotes

5. Author Profile

1. Introduction

RBI in its Consultation Paper has proposed to classify Peer-to-Peer (P2P) lending platforms as NBFCs. NBFCs in India are considered to be an alternative to the banking sector, with the only distinction being the prohibition on collecting demand deposits and the absence of running accounts. The established categories of NBFCs as per section 45I include loan, investment, asset finance and residuary non-banking companies incorporated under the Companies Act 1956. This blog post will examine the various categories of NBFCs in India and whether P2P lending platforms are within any of these established categories under law. The legality of the proposed course of action by the RBI in its consultation paper is subsequently examined. Further, the legal implications of the same, i.e the components of the increased compliance by the P2P platforms is discussed in detail.

2. Legal Basis for Classifying P2P Lending Platforms as NBFCs

P2P lenders are platforms serving as marketplaces for the lenders and the borrowers of funds to connect. Their very business model does not render them as a provider of finance, they are only an intermediary in the financial services sector. There is no question that loan companies are NBFCs under section 45I(f) of the RBI Act, 1935 [1]. However, since these P2P platforms do not provide any finance themselves, there can be no ground for classifying them as a loan company within section 45I of the RBI Act. NBFCs are also classified into deposit taking NBFCs and non-deposit taking NBFCs. In this situation, the question of permissibility, or legal basis, of taking deposits by the platform does not arise as the funds are to be directly transferred from the lender to the borrower, as stipulated in the Consultation Paper itself. The Paper further states that the balance sheet of the platform cannot indicate any borrowing/lending activity, which entails that the platform cannot itself provide finance or receive any funds for the provision of loans to others. Platforms are not allowed to determine the interest rates as they are not a party to the transaction. Neither would they be liable in cases of default by the borrower. These rules, standard for P2P platforms in other jurisdictions too, confirm the assumption that the platform itself is not providing finance and thus, cannot be entrusted with any liability, obligation from the transaction. However, it has to be vigilant in its role in maintaining data on the market participants on the platform for the fulfillment of KYC norms.

Serious concerns as to the financial health of the economy, however, are bound to arise if such entities are to continue operations without any regulatory supervision. The existing regulations, when made could not have fathomed the niche business models of the present. It is for this reason that sector-specific guidelines are often released for the benefit of all market participants as was seen in the case the revised e-commerce regulations [2]. In the present case, the proposed action is classifying P2P lending platforms as NBFCs with the RBI reserving the power to name any 'non-banking institutions' as NBFCs. Clause (a) of section 45I of the RBI Act 1934 declares that the business of a non banking financial institution includes the business of a non-banking financial company as specified under subsection (f). Clause (iii) of subsection (f) defines a non-banking financial company to include any other non-banking institution or class of such institutions, as the RBI may, with the previous approval of the Central Government and by notification in the Official Gazette, specify. Clause (c), in contrast identifies NBFCs through their activities, through their 'principal business'. The fifty/fifty test to determine the principal business of the firm as to the engagement of at least fifty percent of the assets of the firm in the core operations of the firm is not applicable if the RBI chooses to declare any 'non-banking institution' as a NBFC. In the present case, in the absence of any established characteristics of a NBFC within clause (c), the RBI has made use of clause (f) to meet the primary objective of regulation. The RBI will not exceed its regulatory authority in doing so. The only restriction on such an action is that an NBFCs cannot include any institution whose principal business is that of agricultural activity, industrial activity, sale/purchase of goods, sale/purchase/construction of immovable property.

3. Legal Implications of Classifying P2P Lending Platforms as NBFCs

The Reserve Bank under section 45JA of the RBI Act 1934, can validly determine the policy and give directions to all or any of the non-banking financial companies relating to income recognition, accounting standards, making of proper provision for bad and doubtful debts, capital adequacy based on risk weights for assets and credit conversion factors for off-balance sheet items and also relating to deployment of funds by a non-banking financial company, or a class of non-banking financial companies, or non-banking financial companies generally, as the case may be. Further, such non-banking financial companies shall be bound to follow the policy so determined and the directions so issued. Without prejudice to the generality of the powers named above, the Bank may also give directions to NBFCs generally or to a class of NBFCs or to any particular NBFC as to (a) the purpose for which advances or other fund based or non-fund based accommodation may not be made; and (b) the maximum amount of advances or other financial accommodation or investment in shares and other securities which, having regard to the paid-up capital, reserves and deposits of the NBFC’s and other relevant considerations, which can be validly made by that NBFC.

Section 45JA of the RBI Act 1934 is illustrious of the vast powers with the central bank to frame directions and policies applicable to NBFC’s. Powers of regulation extend to the subjective satisfaction of the RBI that the affairs of the NBFC are being conducted in a manner prejudicial to its depositors or the NBFC itself other than the established grounds of public interest and regulation of the financial system of the country to its advantage. This is of importance to P2P lending platforms because the characterization of their organizations as NBFCs would not just indicate compliance with the existing regulatory mechanism applicable to NBFCs but also any other direction, notification, policy that can be validly issued in the future on the subjective satisfaction of the above broad grounds. P2P lending platforms, many not even public companies presently may not be able to operate in the manner that is most beneficial to its private interests in the interest of the public. Further, no other legal form of organization other than a company would be valid under law. Further, no P2P Platform would be able to adopt any other legal form of organization (sole proprietorship, partnership etc.) other than a company due to the fact that clause (c) grants the power on the RBI to name any non-banking financial ‘company’ to include any other non-banking ‘institution’ or class of ‘institutions’. These ‘institutions’, when named NBFCs under law would be companies and would have to change their form of organization, by registration as a company within the Companies Act 2013, if necessary.

As per section 45I of the RBI Act 1934, all NBFCs excepting those which are regulated by other statutory/regulatory bodies are to be registered with the RBI. P2P lending platforms will thus have to comply with the following:

Minimum net worth requirement of Rs 2 crore for registration.
Make minimum investments as stipulated in RBI notifications in central, state government securities and would be liable to pay a penal interest in the case of non-compliance.
A minimum of 20% of net profits will have to be transferred to the Reserve Fund from which no appropriations are permissible except with intimation to the Central Bank within 21 days from such withdrawal.
Statements, information called for under the provisions of chapter IIIB would have to be furnished.
RBI bank is empowered to file a winding up petition if it is satisfied that the NBFC is unable to pay its debt or its continuance is detrimental to public interest/depositors of the company.
Prohibited from disclosing any information contained in any statement or return submitted by such company under the provisions of Chapter IIIB; or obtained through audit or inspection or otherwise by the Bank. Such information is to be treated as confidential with the exception of disclosure to any other NBFC in accordance with the practice and usage customary amongst such companies or as permitted or required under any other law.
Scope of business of banks is limited by section 16(1) of Banking Regulation Act - the only limitation being the prohibition on checking facilities, due to absence of demand deposits.

3.1. Threshold Mechanism under Indian Law

Due to differential financial risk posed by different categories of NBFCs, there exist different regulatory mechanisms applicable to the different classes. For these reasons other than administrative convenience, NBFCs were categorised into the following three groups:

Deposit accepting NBFCs,
Non-deposit accepting NBFCs with assets of less than Rs.100 crore, and
Non-deposit accepting NBFCs with assets of Rs.100 crore and above.

With the aim to achieve a balance between under-regulation and over-regulation in the sector, RBI increased the threshold asset size for an NBFC to be considered systemically important (NBFC-ND-SI) from Rs.100 crore to Rs.500 crore [3]. A simplified regulatory framework has been established for NBFCs which are not systemically important (NBFCs-ND), i.e. NBFCs having total assets less than Rs.500 crore.

As per Economic Times, Faircent’s [4] enterprise valuation, which can be indicative of its net assets, is Rs 50 crore [5]. Keeping in mind that Faircent is arguably one of the biggest market players in the P2P segment, it seems that most P2P lending platforms will have net assets worth less than 500 crore, at least in the near future. Thus, this blog post, to analyse the applicable regulatory regime relies on the assumption that P2P lending platforms, if recognized as NBFCs, would not be systematically important as per the criteria laid down under law. Systematically Important NBFCs have different leverage, capital adequacy, asset classification, corporate governance and disclosure norms.

The RBI issued Prudential Norms Directions for Non-Systematically Important Non-Banking Financial (Non-Deposit Accepting or Holding) Companies in 2015 [6]. This framework classifies non deposit taking NBFCs on the basis of their access to public funds and customer interface. Subclause (ii) of clause (3) of Paragraph 1 states that these directions, excepting paragraph 15 are not applicable to NSI-NBFC’s provided that they do not accept or hold public funds. As per paragraph 15, a certificate will have to be submitted to the Regional Office of the Department of Non-Banking Supervision by the statutory auditor within one month from the date of finalization of the balance sheet and in any case not later than December 30th of that year.

NSI-ND-NBFCs do not have to comply with the limited prudential norms when there is no access to public funds, either directly or indirectly. In the present case, the P2P Platform will not itself have any access to public funds, the funds being transferred directly from the lender to the borrower. The RBI in its consultation paper has proposed the applicability of a leverage ratio to P2P platforms which is in contravention of Paragraph 1 of the deemed regulations. The powers of the RBI under section 45JA of the RBI Act 1934 do not include the making of any directions/regulations which involve the applicability of a leverage ratio. If P2P platforms are made to comply with the deemed leverage ratio requirement under law, 7, it results in apprehension as the possibility of applicability of the other provisions of the NSI-ND-NBFC Prudential Norms Directions. The question as to the existence of regulatory authority to impose the leverage ratio arises which deserves clarification by the RBI.

3.2. Change in Management or Control of NBFCs

The Non-Banking Financial Companies (Approval of Acquisition or Transfer of Control) Directions, 2014 [herein after referred to as ‘Change in Control Directions’) was a step towards ensuring that all NBFCs are managed by ‘fit and proper’ management [8]. Earlier, only intimation with the Regional Office was required.

In 2015, addressing the responses from the industry, the RBI issued revised guidelines [9] to make prior written permission of the Reserve Bank be required for the following activities:

Any takeover or acquisition of control of an NBFC, which may or may not result in change of management.
Any change in the shareholding of an NBFC, including progressive increases over time, which would result in acquisition/ transfer of shareholding of 26 per cent or more of the paid up equity capital of the NBFC. This would not extend to cases involving buyback of shares/ reduction in capital provided approval from a competent court has been obtained.
Any change in the management of the NBFC which would result in change in more than 30 per cent of the directors, excluding independent directors. Prior approval would not be required for those directors who get re-elected on retirement by rotation.
Further, P2P lending platforms will have to continue to inform the RBI regarding any change in their directors/ management as stipulated under Non-Systemically Important Non-Banking Financial (Non-Deposit Accepting or Holding) Companies Prudential Norms (Reserve Bank) Directions, 2015.

3.3. Compliance with KYC/AML/CFT Norms

Non-deposit-taking NBFCs with assets of Rs 25 Crore and above are to comply with Know Your Customer (KYC) norms / Anti-Money Laundering (AML) standards / Combating of Financing of Terrorism (CFT) through the allotment of Unique Customer Identification Code for NBFC Customers in India (UCIC) as intimated by the RBI in its circular dated May 3, 2013 [10]. According to RBI's master circular dated July 1, 2014 [11], NBFCs are required to prepare a risk profile of each customer and apply enhanced due diligence measures on higher risk customers. Further, NBFCs are to put in place policies, systems, and procedures for risk management keeping in view the risks involved in a transaction, account or banking/business relationships. In 2015, the RBI issued another notification [12], which stated that the periodicity of the updation of the data required to be maintained through the 'client due diligence' directions should not be less than once in five years in the case of low risk category customers, and not less than once in two years in case of high and medium risk categories. Full KYC exercise will have to be done every two years for high risk, every eight years for medium risk, and every ten years for low risk individuals and entities taking in to account the adequacy of the data obtained through client due diligence measures, if any. The 2014 directions also stated that detailed guidelines on Customer Due Diligence (CDD) measures made applicable to Politically Exposed Person (PEP) and their family members or close relatives will have to be complied with.

Further, NBFCs have been warned in the notification that the information collected from the customer for the purpose of opening of account should be kept confidential, and should not be divulged for cross selling or any other purposes. NBFCs have to ensure that the information sought from the customer is relevant to the perceived risk, is not intrusive, and is in conformity with the guidelines issued in this regard. Any other information from the customer should be sought separately with her/his consent, and after opening the account.

If the NBFC has knowledge or reason to believe that the client account opened by a professional intermediary is on behalf of a single client, the client must be identified. NBFCs should not allow opening and/or holding of an account on behalf of a client/s by professional intermediaries, like Lawyers, Chartered Accountants, etc., who are unable to disclose the true identity of the beneficial owner due to professional obligations of customer confidentiality. Some documents have been specified which should be called for and verified for the opening of an account in the name of a proprietary concern.

A Principal officer should be appointed to ensure compliance with the KYC/AML/CFT norms and the obligations under the Prevention of the Money Laundering Act 2002. A system should be made for the recording of transactions involving counterfeit coins/currency, cash exceeding Rs 10 lakh rupees, either individually or in a series, and for transactions that are ‘suspicious’ according to the Money Laundering Act 2002. NBFCs should maintain for at least ten years from the date of transaction between the NBFC and the client, all necessary records of transactions referred to in rule 3 of the Prevention of Money-laundering (Maintenance of Records of the Nature and Value of Transactions, the Procedure and Manner of Maintaining and Time for Furnishing Information and Verification and Maintenance of Records of the Identity of the Clients of the Banking Companies, Financial Institutions and Intermediaries) rules 2005, (hereinafter, referred to as the PMLA rules) to enable the reconstruction of transactions and the provision of evidence for prosecution of persons involved in criminal activity [12]. Even if P2P lending platforms do not enter into the transaction with the customer for the provision of the loan itself, there does exist a transaction involving the payment of processing fee etc. to the P2P lending platform, indicating compliance with the PMLA rules. Further, records pertaining to the identification of the customer will have to be maintained for a period of ten years after the termination of the business relationship. ‘Suspicious transactions’ will have to be reported to the Financial Intelligence Unit India. To combat financing of terrorism activities, continuous screening and monitoring of transactions which have no apparent economic or visible lawful purpose should be done. NBFCs should give special attention to business relationships and transactions with persons in countries which do not or insufficiently apply the FATF recommendations.

3.4. Compliance with Guidelines on Fair Practices Code for NBFCs

Though P2P lending platforms are not loan companies, the object of classifying them as a NBFC would be defeated if they are not made to comply with the RBI established FCP guidelines. These requirements include:

All communications to the borrower shall be in the vernacular language or a language as understood by the borrower.
To enable the borrower to make an informed decision, loan application forms should include necessary information which affects the interest of the borrower, so that a meaningful comparison with the terms and conditions offered by other NBFCs.
A system of providing acknowledgement for receipt of all loan applications with a time frame should be established.
The amount of the loan sanctioned along with the terms and conditions including annualised rate of interest and method of application thereof should be kept on record by the NBFC.
NBFCs shall mention the penal interest charged for late repayment in bold in the loan agreement.
Non furnishment of a copy of the loan agreement or enclosures quoted in the loan agreement being an unfair practice, NBFCs are, therefore, advised to furnish a copy of the loan agreement along with a copy each of all enclosures quoted in the loan agreement to all the borrowers at the time of sanction / disbursement of loans.
The NBFCs should give notice to the borrower of any change in the terms and conditions including disbursement schedule, interest rates, service charges, prepayment charges etc.
NBFCs should also ensure that changes in interest rates and charges are effected only prospectively. A suitable condition in this regard should be incorporated in the loan agreement. Decision to recall / accelerate payment or performance under the agreement should be in consonance with the loan agreement.
NBFCs should release all securities on repayment of all dues or on realisation of the outstanding amount of loan subject to any legitimate right or lien for any other valid claim. If such right of set off is to be exercised, the borrower shall be given notice about the same with full particulars about the remaining claims and the conditions under which NBFCs are entitled to retain the securities till the relevant claim is settled/paid.
NBFCs should refrain from interference in the affairs of the borrower except for the purposes provided in the terms and conditions of the loan agreement (unless new information, not earlier disclosed by the borrower, has come to the notice of the lender).
In case of receipt of request from the borrower for transfer of borrowed account, the consent or objection of the NBFC, should be conveyed within 21 days from the date of receipt of request. Such transfer shall be as per transparent contractual terms in consonance with law.
In the matter of recovery of loans, the NBFCs should not resort to undue harassment. Staff should adequately trained to deal with the customers in an appropriate manner.
The Board of Directors of NBFCs should also lay down an appropriate grievance redressal mechanism within the organization to resolve disputes arising in this regard.
NBFCs will have the freedom of implementing measures which enhance the scope of the guidelines without sacrificing their underlying spirit.

The directions as to the formation of appropriate internal principles and procedures in determining interest rates excepting processing and other charges are not be applicable to P2P lending platforms. Thus, P2P lending platforms are not be made to adopt the interest rate model and communicate with the borrower as to the approach for gradation of risk and rationale for charging different rate of interest to different categories of borrowers.

3.5. Obligations to Share Credit Information

In terms of Section 2(f) (ii) of the Credit Information Companies (Regulation) Act, 2005, a non-banking financial company as defined under clause (f) of Section 45-I of the Reserve Bank of India Act, 1934 has also been included as "credit institution" [13]. Further, the Credit Information Companies (Regulation) Act provides that every credit institution in existence shall become a member of at least one credit information company [14]. Thus all NBFCs being credit institutions are required to become a member of at least one credit information company as per the statute. In this regard, in terms of sub-sections (1) and (2) of Section 17 of the Credit Information Companies (Regulation) Act, 2005, a credit information company may require its members to furnish credit information as it may deem necessary in accordance with the provisions of the Act and every such credit institution has to provide the required information to that credit information company.

In terms of Regulation 10(a) (ii) of the Credit Information Companies Regulations, 2006, every credit institution shall:

keep the credit information maintained by it, updated regularly on a monthly basis or at such shorter intervals as may be mutually agreed upon between the credit institution and the credit information company; and
take all such steps which may be necessary to ensure that the credit information furnished by it, is update, accurate and complete.

Thus, P2P lending platforms will have to regularly disclose credit information, both current and historical, to enable the creation of robust databases with Credit Information Companies.

4. Endnotes

[1] See: https://rbidocs.rbi.org.in/rdocs/Publications/PDFs/RBIAM_230609.pdf.

[2] See: http://dipp.nic.in/English/acts_rules/Press_Notes/pn3_2016.pdf.

[3] See: https://rbidocs.rbi.org.in/rdocs/content/pdfs/PNNBFC200315.pdf.

[4] See: https://www.faircent.com/.

[5] See: http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/small-biz/startups/faircent-com-raises-pre-series-a-funding-of-250k/articleshow/47630279.cms.

[6] See: https://www.rbi.org.in/scripts/NotificationUser.aspx?Id=9830&Mode=0.

[7] See: http://dipp.nic.in/English/acts_rules/Press_Notes/pn3_2016.pdf.

[8] See: https://rbi.org.in/Scripts/NotificationUser.aspx?Id=8899&Mode=0#f1.

[9] See: https://rbi.org.in/Scripts/BS_NBFCNotificationView.aspx?Id=9934.

[10] See: https://rbi.org.in/scripts/NotificationUser.aspx?Id=7962&Mode=0.

[11] See: https://rbi.org.in/scripts/NotificationUser.aspx?Id=9081&Mode=0.

[12] See: https://rbi.org.in/Scripts/BS_NBFCNotificationView.aspx?Id=9449.

[13] See: http://www.incometaxindia.gov.in/Pages/acts/credit-information-companies-act.aspx.

[14] See: https://rbi.org.in/Scripts/BS_ViewMasCirculardetails.aspx?id=9913#16.

5. Author Profile

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/rbi-consultation-paper-on-p2p-lending-legality-and-implications

Call for Essays: Studying Internet in India

sumandro — 2016-07-04T12:48:15Z

As Internet makes itself comfortable amidst everyday lives in India, it becomes everywhere and everyware, it comes in 40 MBPS Unlimited and in chhota recharges – though no longer in zero flavour – the Researchers at Work (RAW) programme at the Centre for Internet and Society invites abstracts for essays that explore how do we study internet in India today.

Submission deadline extended to Sunday, July 03.

Source: Leonardo Flores.

How do we move beyond a fascination with new digital things and interfaces that we engage with on the internet, which are increasingly becoming the objects and sites of our research and creative practices? How do we engage with these on their own terms, and perhaps also against the grain? What "new" is being brought in, performed, and afforded by these digital artefacts in our daily lives? How can our concerns and practices benefit from developing an awareness of their aesthetics, functions, and politics?

This call is for researchers, workers, and others interested in closely – or from a distance – commenting on these topics and questions.

Please send abstracts (200 words) to raw@cis-india.org by Sunday, July 03, 2016. The subject of the email should be 'Studying Internet in India.'

We will select up to 10 abstracts and announce them on Tuesday, July 05, 2016.

The selected authors will be asked to submit the final longform essay (3,000-4,000 words) by Sunday, July 31, 2016. The final essays will be published on the RAW Blog. The authors will be offered an honourarium of Rs. 6,000.

We understand that not all essays can be measured in words. The authors are very much welcome to work with text, images, sounds, videos, code, and other mediatic forms that the internet offers. We will not be running a Word Count on the final 'essay.' The basic requirement is that the 'essay' must offer an argument – through text, or otherwise.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/call-for-essays-studying-internet-in-india-2016

New Modes and Sites of Humanities Practice

sneha-pp — 2016-06-30T04:45:25Z

Sections

01. Digital Humanities in India?

02. A Question of Digital Humanities

03. Reading from a Distance – Data as Text

04. The Infrastructure Turn in the Humanities

05. Living in the Archival Moment

06. New Modes and Sites of Humanities Practice

07. Digital Humanities in India – Concluding Thoughts

Introduction

From a brief exploration of the problem of new objects and methods of research in the digital context, we have come to or rather returned to the problem of location or contextualising DH, and whether it may be called a field or discipline in itself, in India. As the previous sections may have illustrated, most of the prominent initiatives around DH in India have largely been within the university context, or have at least focused around the university as the centre of the processes of knowledge production, and emphasise a move away from more traditional ways of doing humanities, and at a larger level the more established and disciplinary modes of knowledge formation. In the context of pedagogy, DH seems to be developing in a very specific role, which is that of training in a certain set of skills and topics, which the existing disciplines have so far not been able to provide or even accommodate. These include tools for working with digitisation processes, digital archives, and the use of computational methods in the study of cultural artifacts. Thus processes such as topic modelling, data visualisation, cultural analytics, sentiment analysis and several more become increasingly prominent in discussions about DH. The university or more specifically the traditional classroom offers a particular kind of teaching-learning experience which may not always have within its ambit the necessary resources or strategies to foster new methods of knowledge production, and a lot of DH work has been posited as trying to plug knowledge gaps in precisely this area.

Wikipedia and internet-based sources of information are entering classrooms with the proliferation of gadgets and tools, and with this there is a tendency towards adopting a more open, participatory and customised model of learning based on collaboration. DH has been characterised by many as a space, or method that intervenes in the traditional ‘hierarchies of expertise’ (Davidson and Goldberg, 2010) – not only in terms of people, but also spaces, methods and objects of learning - to present a significant ‘alternative’ that is now slowly becoming more mainstream. A rather direct example of this in the global discourse on DH is the growth of a number of ‘alt- academics’ [1]: people with training in the humanities who now inhabit what earlier seemed to be a rather nebulous space between academics and an array of practices in computing, art and community development among many others. But it is the in-between, or the liminal space that holds the potential for new kinds of knowledge to be generated. The connotations of this notion however are many and problematic, as seen particularly in the emphasis on new kinds of skills or competences that are now required to inhabit such a space, as also the narrative of loss of certain critical skills that are part of the disciplinary method and the resistance from certain quarters within the university to acknowledge such a trend. Conversely, it is also reflective of how certain kinds of skills in writing, reading, visualisation and curation have now become essential and therefore visible. While the DH discourse in India has developed mostly within the university space, given its multidisciplinary interests and methods, it is often seen as bearing potential in terms of working outside the academic norm. Through an examination of changes in teaching-learning methods, creative and critical practices that come about with the adoption of the digital, it may be useful to explore whether it indeed opens up such alternate modes of humanities practice and how it informs the way we do DH in India; as practitioners, researchers, students, teachers or the lay person. The growth of the internet and digital tools and technologies has led to many changes in teaching-learning practices, and engendered new methods and forms of humanities practice, all of which may now be found within the university or academic space. It is therefore imperative to examine these new modes of research and practice, to arrive a better understanding of the changes in and possibilities available for humanities work after the digital. The notion of the ‘alternate’ is also an important concern here, and the emergence of these new modes of humanities practice help unpack and understand this term better.

Technology in the Classroom

This state of being within and to a certain extent outside of a certain predominant discourse is a peculiar one with several possibilities, and DH, owing to its interdisciplinary content and methods, seems to be a suitable space to foster new and alternate knowledge-making practices. India is also still a multi-layered technological space very much in a moment of transition, and the debates remain largely confined to the English and History departments and to some extent library and archival spaces. Outside of the university circle however, there are a number of initiatives, such as online archival efforts, media, art and design practices and research, where one may see DH–related work being done. What remains an important part of the discourse in the context of the university is the access to and a more substantial and critical engagement with technology in the classroom.

The use of technology in education has grown by leaps and bounds in the last decade or so in India, as evidenced by the number of initiatives taken to introduce ICTs in the classroom [2]. However, the digital divide still persists, as a result of which many initiatives come with problems of their own, the most important being the lack of connection among practice, content and pedagogy [3]. Vikram Vincent, a doctoral scholar in the Interdisciplinary Program in Educational Technology, Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai, attributes this to a problem of understanding technology itself and what it can do for learning. He looks at technology as an extension of the human body and not something alien to it. Over the course of his research, he has found that the prevalent attitude to the use of technology in the classroom, particularly in early ICTs in education projects, has been more techno-centric rather than learner-centric, which is not the most effective approach [4]. Technology has always been around in some form or the other, from drawing on walls to the blackboard to now the smart board; it has always been in the classroom. How you choose to use it determines the outcomes, and one needs to ensure that the learning environment evolves with the new technology that is introduced, because it does not happen automatically but over a period of time.

The Wikipedia India Education programme pilot project, implemented in Pune in 2011 is an example of the number of challenges that the introduction of a new technology in the classroom brought forth, in terms of skills, content and pedagogy [5]. The need to focus on the educational component of the technology, the improvement of skills of the learner in writing, research and communication, rather than on the tool itself has been an important learning from the programme, even as it continues in a different university today. As Vincent adds further, the problem arises with looking at technology as a disruptive element or merely a tool to aid learning, which prevents institutions from envisioning a more holistic model of learning that takes some amount of time and effort. This also requires the appropriate stimulus and other conditions such as training of teachers, access to resources and training in certain required skills, addressing barriers of language and so forth, which is a feature of some programmes, such as the IT @ school in Kerala which have seen a measure of success [6]. Vincent further mentions examples of programmes he has been part of, some of them under the MHRD-NMEICT initiative which focussed on the teaching-learning process rather than the technology itself, key to which is building teacher capacity to use new and already available resources better [7]. These would be crucial steps to take before envisioning a model of teaching-learning that is premised largely on digital technologies and the internet.

While educational technology is a separate field in itself which looks at better interactions between teaching-learning practices and technology [8], it does form part of the context, or landscape in India within which DH would perhaps develop as a discipline, practice or a pedagogic approach.

Another predominant discourse that informs DH is that of Information Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D) which is often used as a rather broad, catch-all term, and has been variously defined and used by different groups and stakeholders across domains (Saith et al, 2008). ICT4D is premised largely around the question of access, and seeks to bridge the digital divide in terms of knowledge, resources, people and infrastructure, among other things. This has also been an intensely debated term, given its social and political implications, particularly in the manner in which it informs a larger discourse on development, technology and globalisation in the global South.(Sundaram, 2005) It is important to understand whether DH has been posited as making an intervention into these prevailing systems of knowledge – so that the mode of understanding both technology and the humanities, and the interaction between the two domains (assuming that they are separate) undergoes a significant change. What then goes into promoting more institutional stability for DH, in other words, in teaching and learning it – will be a question to contend with in the years to come, as more universities take to incubating research around digital technologies and related components and incorporating this into the existing curricula.

Towards a Digital Pedagogy

Dr. Abhijit Roy, Assistant Professor at the Department of Media, Communication and Culture, Jadavpur University is positive about the changes he sees in pedagogy and research with the advent of digital technologies. According to him, while a media or film studies department would be close to the concerns of DH, and use some form of digital technology such as video clips or blogs as part of coursework, it is particularly important to see what change it has brought about in traditional humanities disciplines like History and languages. While some of these changes are elementary, such as the use of digital technologies in classroom teaching and learning exercises, it is in the practice of research that he sees a vast change now. Many researchers, many of his students also, have found this a useful part of the research process, through the use of blogs and social media and the possibilities to publish and engage in discussions with other researchers through platforms and tools like Academia or Scalar [9]. It not only makes the process more transparent, but also encourages an ethos of constant sharing, dissemination and a network of usage and storage online. This has transformed the way research and pedagogy can be imagined now, and opened up several possibilities for teaching-learning practices.

It is in realising this potential for new research and pedagogical models that universities have slowly begun to adopt digital technologies, but the institutional efforts at building curricula specifically around DH-related concerns have been few, with the prominent ones in India being the courses at Jadavpur University and Presidency University in Kolkata, and more recently Srishti School of Arts, Design and Technology in Bangalore. The change is recent, as several researchers have pointed out. There have always been concerns about privacy and regulation of content, whether on a university archive or its network. The enthusiasm towards ‘anything digital is good’ is relatively new, and comes from a larger (and sometimes rather utopian) development discourse focussed around modernity and technology. Curricularisation comes with its own issues too, and they stem largely from the fact that one is still unable to understand fully the nature of the digital and its facets - we also inhabit a time when there is a transition from analogue to digital, and both modes exist simultaneously - but the rate of change is faster with the digital than with other domains of knowledge, so much so that the curricula developed may often seem provisional or arcane, which makes it doubly challenging to demonstrate its various facets in practice, particularly in the classroom. A useful distinction would be between DH being brought in as a problem-solving approach to address the extant issues of the humanities, thus also seen as threat to the disciplines themselves, but to see if it has its own epistemological concerns which may be related to but also distinct from the humanities - in short to help us ask new questions, or provide new ways of asking old ones.

The development of courses on DH in three universities in India, and the manner in which the field has been ‘curricularised’ so to say, would be an indication of its specific academic concerns in the Indian context, and the disciplinary challenges and questions that it may throw up for the teaching-learning process. Expectedly, the three courses mobilise a set of resources and expertise that the schools have built over the course of many years. In doing so they also foray into areas that existing humanities courses at the university may not have explored enough, within their own disciplinary framework. For example the course on Digital Humanities and Cultural Informatics at Jadavpur University [10] comprises of components on software studies and digital music preservation, building on work done at the large archives at the School of Cultural Texts and Records. Similarly, the course at Presidency University [11] has components on storytelling in digital media through video games, while the course at Srishti [12] has a focus on design practice and critical making amongst other interests. The courses therefore follow a decidedly interdisciplinary framework, which no doubt interesting, also makes curriculum development and course assessment a challenge. While the ‘digital’ aspect of ‘DH’ forms a significant part of these explorations, the manner in which it is being studied is an important point of focus – whether as a condition, space, concept or object, rather than just a set of tools and methods that facilitate the enquiry of the humanities. Digitisation significantly alters the cultural artifact, and there is a need to understand and theorise this digital object better. As Padmini Ray Murray points out, the digital is one way to mediate the material object, particularly those that are not textual, since that kind of experiential access can only be provided by the digital, especially in the case of archival objects. A critical understanding of the digital needs to therefore be a key aspect of such an enquiry in DH.

Alternate Spaces of Humanities Practice

While these are the developments within academia or the university space, there are a number of spaces outside this circle that have also been asking similar questions, and producing new kinds of scholarship and research around these ideas. The Indiancine.ma and Pad.ma archives have not only served as rich repository of material on film and video, used by scholars and film enthusiasts alike, but also as a pedagogic tool in spaces like the Media Lab at Jadavpur University. Through an innovative fellowship programme, Pad.ma has supported research and film making using the archive as a platform. An interesting example here would be a documentary film on power plants in Chhattisgarh made by Sunil Kumar. Available as a film treatment/script on Pad.ma, Kumar’s work is based on research in mainly two districts of Chhattisgarh, where he met and spoke with people, collected documents and shot several hours of video, which he then published in the form of 80 footage series on Pad.ma [13]. There are several other examples on Pad.ma, such as the video-art project on the Radia tapes, and the work on "perfume arts" in Bangalore [14]. The Sound and Picture Archives for Research on Women (SPARROW) through its workshops on oral and visual history has tried to engage with the more pedagogic aspects of the archive [15]. While the possibilities are many, the uptake of such platforms in universities has been slow, due to issues that range from lack of internet connectivity to a discomfort or unfamiliarity with the internet and other kinds of technology. This eventually relegates initiatives like these to the space of an alternate, extracurricular or outlier, even though they seem to be asking the same questions as the mainstream institutions and doing similar work.

What this also refers to is the space for new modes of knowledge production that an increased interaction with digital and internet technologies now engenders or even brings to the fore in already existing practices. With these however, also come the questions about the legitimacy of these forms and methods of knowledge production, as seen in the rather polarised positions around DH in its global discourse. The Wikipedia is one example of this, and illustrates some of the core concerns of and about DH as it calls into question notions about authorship, expertise and established models of pedagogy and learning. Lawrence Liang (2011) describes this as a larger conflict over the authority of knowledge, the origins of which he locates in the history of the book, and specifically in the print revolution and pre-print cultures of the 15th -18th centuries. He likens the debate over Wikipedia’s credibility, or more broadly over technologies of collaborative knowledge production ushered in by the Internet to similar phenomena seen before in early print culture and how it contributed to the construction and articulation of the idea of authority itself. He says:

The authority of knowledge is often spoken of in a value-neutral and ahistorical manner. It would therefore be useful to situate authority in history, where it is not seen to be an inherent quality but a transitive one 6 located in specific technological changes. For instance, there is often an unstated assumption about the stability of the book as an object of knowledge, but the technology of print originally raised a host of questions about authority. In the same way, the domain of digital collaborative knowledge production raises a set of questions and concerns today, such as the difference between the expert and the amateur, as well as between forms of production: digital versus paper and collaborative versus singular author modes of knowledge production. Can we impose the same questions that emerged over the centuries in the case of print to a technology that is barely ten years old?

He further goes on to elaborate that the question of the authority of knowledge should ideally be located within a larger ‘knowledge apparatus’, comprising of certain technologies and practices, (in this case that of reading, writing, editing, compilation, classification and creative appropriations) which help inflate the definitions of authority and knowledge even more.

The above argument throws into sharp relief the notion of the ‘alternate’–often posited as the outlier or a vantage point, or even as being in resistance to a certain dominant discourse or body of knowledge. While resistance itself is discursive; the ‘alternate’ has also always existed in various forms, such as the pre-print cultures illustrated in the argument above, and particularly in India where several kinds of prominent practices and occupations are but alternatives - from alternative medicine to education - to the already established or mainstream system in place. As mentioned earlier, these practices may just be increasingly visible and acknowledged now. The attempts to subsume these alternate practices under a unifying term such as DH, which began as and may perhaps have been relegated to the status of a sub-culture for long, within academia then seem to be one way of trying to circumvent the authority of knowledge question.

Humanities and Technology: A Twinned History

Another factor in this reduced visibility of the alternate and now re-emergence is the invisible ‘technologised’ history of the humanities, which prompts us to rethink the separation between the humanities and technology as mutually exclusive domains. Therefore by extension then, the term DH itself may be a misnomer or yet another creative re-appropriation of various knowledge practices already in existence. David Berry (2012) in his essay on the computational turn speaks of possibilities that computationality, and specifically new software and code offer in terms of unifying multiple kinds of knowledge in the university. He says that:

In trying to understand the digital humanities our first step might be to problematize computationality, so that we are able to think critically about how knowledge in the 21st century is transformed into information through computational techniques, particularly within software. It is interesting that at a time when the idea of the university is itself under serious rethinking and renegotiation, digital technologies are transforming our ability to use and understand information outside of these traditional knowledge structures. This is connected to wider challenges to the traditional narratives that served as unifying ideas for the university and, with their decline, has led to difficulty in justifying and legitimating the postmodern university vis-à-vis government funding. (5)

Berry therefore indicates that this turn towards computationality is the result of an emerging need to demonstrate the relevance of the university structure to processes of knowledge production, therefore reiterating the ‘crisis’ argument. The notion of the postmodern university has been examined in detail by Bill Readings, who Berry quotes in his paper. Readings (1997) is sceptical of the term postmodern, preferring instead the idea of a post historical university, which is divested from the notion of the nation-state and further culture as a unifying idea, and is moving towards a notion of excellence that he sees as techno-bureaucratic, a result of several factors including globalisation and the fact that processes of knowledge production and institutionalisation are no longer centred around a liberal subject. If the demonstrated project of the university has changed, the emergence of such new discourse, and specifically concepts and terms such as the ‘alt – academy’ has relevance to how one may now imagine new spaces, objects, processes and figures of knowledge itself.

The significance of the university system to knowledge production has been a recurring point of much debate and discussion in India. Although not explicitly stated as a crisis in humanities by the people interviewed, there are problems of content, pedagogy, infrastructure, and vision that continue to plague higher education at large [16], and very often technological fixes are seen as a solution to these, in some part due to the imagination of a techno-democracy as described in the introduction to this report. As Berry points out then, computationality is a promise, or possibility to do things differently, which is then also inherently assumed to be a way of doing things better. The computational possibilities of DH still need to be explored, but how much of these contribute qualitatively to addressing or even furthering certain disciplinary concerns, still remains an open question. As Jan and Sebastian point out from their experience of working on Indiancine.ma and Pad.ma, the computational aspects of the archives are still to be developed, as there are still restrictions in terms of speed and feasibility (see chapter on infrastructure [17]); the kind of new questions it produces for cinema studies at large will remain a contention. Further, as Padmini Ray Murray observes, drawing on archival material, or data to develop new computational hypotheses would be a direction to work towards, as not much work has been done in this respect in India (See chapter on archives [18]). The challenges with computationality then demand, as Berry argues, a more critical exploration of the term itself, and in fact can be extended to a critical analysis of the state of digitality more broadly.

Final Notes

The problems with the crisis in the humanities and the contribution of technology to these changes could be located to this change in what has traditionally been seen as the space of culture and reason, which has now moved on to something else, a notion of excellence in Readings’ example, thereby changing the questions at the centre as well. This is perhaps the underlying challenge to the ontological and epistemological stake in the field. At best then DH may be seen as the result of a set of changes in the last couple of decades, the advancements in technology being at the forefront of them, whereby certain new and alternative modes of humanities practice have been brought to the foreground, but have also challenged the manner in which we asked questions before to a certain extent. As the field gains institutional stability, it remains to be seen what the new areas of enquiry that emerge shall then be in the years to come. Some of the questions or points or focus that open up are as follows:

The role of extra-institutional/non-academic or alternate spaces in humanities practice, and in producing and creating new kinds of knowledge.
The increased visibility of new objects and methods within informal and marginal spaces of knowledge production. This demands different, and often innovative methods of enquiry, and whether they alter disciplinary modes of humanities practice and research.
The notion of a moving away from established modes of humanities practice, research and scholarship (therefore the question of a ‘crisis’) which would open up a larger debate around the authority of knowledge.
The ontological and epistemological stake of DH, in short the kinds of new questions it enables us to ask.

As important and visible as the idea of the alternate is in DH, it also presents the mainstream itself as fractured space that imbibes several contradictions of the practices in question, which cannot be confined to these watertight silos of formal/informal, academic or creative. Nevertheless, the mainstream spaces remain crucial for widening and deepening creative digital practice and research in arts and humanities disciplines, and will be the spaces to watch to understand the development of a substantive DH discourse in India.

Endnotes

[1] For more on this see: Nowviskie, Bethany, (Ed.) Alternative Academic Careers for Humanities Scholars, July 2011, http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/alt-ac/cluster/alternative-academic-careers-humanities-scholars, last accessed December 23, 2015.

[2] The largest and most ambitious has been the Ministry of Human Resources and Development’s National Mission in Education through ICT programme (NMEICT), started in 2009. See: http://mhrd.gov.in/technology-enabled-learning-0 Last accessed December 23, 2015.

[3] To stay with the example of the NMEICT, an evaluation of the programme pointed out several challenges to technology-enabled learning, namely in the areas of connectivity, content, and pedagogy. See http://www.sakshat.ac.in/Document/NMEICT_Evaluation_Report.pdf. Last accessed December 23, 2015.

[4] For more see this position paper by the NCERT on education technology in India: http://www.ncert.nic.in/new_ncert/ncert/rightside/links/pdf/focus_group/educational_technology.pdf. Last accessed December 23, 2015.

[5] See an evaluation report on the programme by Tory Read: http://oceanwork.com/portfolio/wikipedia-education-program-reputation-management/. Last accessed December 23, 2015.

[6] See: http://education.kerala.gov.in/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=51&Itemid=59. Last accessed December 23, 2015.

[7] For more on these projects see: http://www.et.iitb.ac.in/sanket/?p=87. Last accessed December 23, 2015.

[8] See: Spector, J. Michael. Fundamentals of Educational Technology: Integrative Approaches and Interdisciplinary Perspectives. New York: Routledge, 2015; and Toru Iiyoshi and M.S. Vijay Kumar. (Eds.) Opening up Education. Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2008, https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/titles/content/9780262515016_Open_Access_Edition.pdf. Also see: http://ciet.nic.in/. Last accessed December 23, 2015.

[9] See: https://www.academia.edu/ and http://scalar.usc.edu/scalar/. Last accessed December 23, 2015.

[10] See: https://sctrdhci.wordpress.com/. Last accessed December 12, 2015.

[11] See: http://dhgenedpresi.blogspot.in/2014/01/welcome-to-digital-humanities-presidency.html. Last accessed December 12, 2015.

[12] See: http://srishti.ac.in/programs/pg-program-ma-in-digital-humanities. Last accessed December 12, 2015.

[13] See: http://pad.ma/texts/sunil_kumar:Future_Power_Plants_in_Chhattisgarh:_a_Documentary_Film_Treatment_%2F_Script. Last accessed December 12, 2015

[14] See: http://pad.ma/texts Last accessed December 12, 2015.

[15] See: http://www.sparrowonline.org/.

[16] See the report of 'The Committee to Advise on Renovation and Rejuvenation of Higher Education: by the Ministry of Human Resources and Development: http://mhrd.gov.in/sites/upload_files/mhrd/files/document-reports/YPC-Report.pdf; and Roy, Kum Kum, "Decoding 'New Education Policy,'" Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 50, Issue No. 19, May 09, 2015, http://www.epw.in/journal/2015/19/web-exclusives/decoding-new-education-policy.html, last accessed December 23, 2015.

[17] See: http://cis-india.org/raw/the-infrastructure-turn-in-the-humanities.

[18] See: http://cis-india.org/raw/living-in-the-archival-moment.

References

Berry, D.M. "The Computational Turn." Culture Machine. Vol 12, 2012 http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/article/viewArticle/440. Last Accessed April 12, 2016.

Davidson, Cathy N and David Theo. Goldberg. The Future of Thinking: Learning Institutions in a Digital Age. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Reports on Digital Media and Learning. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010.

Iiyoshi, Toru and M.S. Vijay Kumar. (Eds.) Opening up Education. Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2008.

Liang, Lawrence. "A Brief History of the Internet from the 15th to the 18th Century." In Critical Point of View: A Wikipedia Reader. Geert Lovink and Nathaniel Tkacz (Eds). Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2011.

Readings, Bill. The University in Ruins. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997.

Saith, A, M. Vijayabaskar and V. Gayathri. ICTs and Indian Social Change. New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2008.

Spector, J. Michael. Fundamentals of Educational Technology: Integrative Approaches and Interdisciplinary Perspectives. New York: Routledge, 2015.

Sundaram, Ravi. "Developmentalism Redux." In Incommunicado Reader. Geert Lovink and Soenke Zehle (Eds.). Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2005.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/new-modes-and-sites-of-humanities-practice

RBI Consultation Paper on P2P Lending: Summary

Pavishka Mittal — 2016-05-18T12:12:23Z

1. Introduction

2. Crowdfunding and P2P Lending

3. Observations Made Regarding Current Practice of P2P Lending Companies

4. Types of Regulatory Regimes for P2P Lending Companies across the World

5. Arguments against Regulation

6. Arguments for Regulation

7. Proposed Regulatory Framework

7.1. Permitted Activity

7.2. Prudential Requirements

7.3. Governance Requirements

7.4. Business Continuity Plan (BCP)

7.5. Customer Interface

7.6. Reporting Requirements

8. Scope of RBI's Regulation

9. Endnotes

10. Author Profile

1. Introduction

The Reserve Bank of India published a Consultation Paper on Peer-to-Peer Lending on April 28, 2016 [1]. The Paper notes that:

Although nascent in India and not significant in value yet, the potential benefits that P2P lending promises to various stakeholders (to the borrowers, lenders, agencies etc.) and its associated risks to the financial system are too important to be ignored. The Reserve Bank (the Bank) has therefore found it necessary to put out this discussion paper to elicit public opinion and views of the various stakeholders on the future course of action having regard to the current legal and regulatory framework in place to regulate the business of financial intermediation.

Here I present a summary of the Consultation Paper. The next post in this series will discuss in detail the different types of obligations that the Peer-to-Peer (henceforth, P2P) Lending Companies will have to satisfy if classified as Non-Bank Financial Companies, and other related issues.

2. Crowdfunding and P2P Lending

The Paper starts with discussing (and distinguishing) SEBI’s Consultation Paper on Crowdfunding in India, published on June 17, 2014, to avoid overlap of jurisdiction [2]. SEBI's paper classified crowdfunding initiatives in to:

Community Crowdfunding: 1) Social Lending, and 2) Reward Crowdfunding; and
Financial Return Crowdfunding: 1) Peer-to-Peer Lending, and 2) Equity Crowdfunding.

Traditionally, Start-ups are funded through private equity, angel investor or loan arrangements with a financial institution. Any offering of public equity takes place only after the product or business becomes commercially viable. However, in Equity based Crowdfunding solicitation is done at an earlier stage. It refers to fund raising by a business, particularly early-stage funding, through offering equity interests in the business to investors online through a crowdfunding platform website acting as the intermediary.

Though, P2P lending did not appear to involve securities, loan/notes/contracts can be traded on a P2P platform or a secondary market. Thus, these loans may become securities, with the contract between the lender and the borrower being the security note.

In summary, SEBI’s paper suggested that under Security Based Crowd funding, the possible routes that could be explored are the following:

Equity based Crowd Funding (EbC): Raising equity through a crowd funding platform.
Debt Based Crowd Funding (DbC) Raising of funds by issuing debentures or debt securities through a crowd funding platform.
Fund Based Crowd Funding (FbC): Raising of funds for pooling under an Alternative Investment Fund (AIF) through a crowd funding platform.

3. Observations Made Regarding Current Practice of P2P Lending Companies

P2P lending is in relation to unsecured loans.
The borrowers and the lenders can be both natural and juristic persons.
The interest rate can range from a flat interest rate fixed by the platform to dynamic interest rates as agreed upon by the borrowers and the lenders to cost plus model (operational costs plus margin for platform and returns for lender).
The companies often follow a reverse auction model in which the lenders bid for a borrower’s loan proposal and the borrower has the freedom to either accept or reject the offer.
Borrowers are able to avail lower rates than those offered by money lenders/unorganized sector. Lenders can obtain higher returns than what conventional investment opportunities offer.
Some of these are involved in the business targeted at micro finance activities with the stated primary goal being social impact and providing easier access of credit to small entrepreneurs.
The borrowers pay an origination fee (either a flat rate fee or as a percentage of the loan amount raised) according to their risk category.
The lenders, depending on the terms of the platform, have to pay an administration fee and an additional fee if they choose to use any additional service (e.g. legal advice etc.), which the platform may provide.
The platform provides the service of collecting loan repayments and doing preliminary assessment on the borrower’s creditworthiness.
The regulatory concerns in such cases would relate to KYC and recovery practices. Since all payments are through bank accounts, the KYC exercise can be deemed to have been carried out by the banks concerned. The platform facilitates collection of post-dated cheques from the borrower in the name of the lender as a proxy for repayment of the loan.
The platform does NOT profit from the difference in the deposit and the loan rates, as is the case with Banking Financial Institutions.
In summary, while crowd funding - equity, debt based and fund based- would fall under the purview of capital markets regulator (SEBI), P2P lending would fall within the domain of the RBI.

4. Types of Regulatory Regimes for P2P Lending Companies across the World

Complete Exemption / Non-regulation due to Lack of Definition: Regulations already in place to be applicable which protect the borrowers from unfair interest rates, unfair credit provision, and false advertising. Hence no further, or specific, regulation is undertaken.
Intermediary Regulation: Registration required as an intermediary to enable it to access the market. Other rules and requirements determine how the platform should conduct its business (for example, the licensing needed to provide credit and/or financial services).
Banking Regulation: To be applicable due to their credit intermediation functions. As such, the platforms must obtain a banking licence; fulfil disclosure requirements and other such regulations.
US Model: Involves two levels of regulation, involving a central agency (SEC in this case) and state legislations.

5. Arguments against Regulation

The presence of regulation would lend credibility to P2P lending, attracting lenders with low awareness to these platforms who may not understand the risks involved specially in the context of susceptibility of these platforms to attract high risk borrowers. Regulation may stifle the growth of an innovative, efficient and accessible avenue for borrowers who either do not have access to formal financial channels or are denied loans by them. The market for P2P lending, currently in a nascent stage does not pose an immediate systemic risk nor any significant impact on monetary policy transmission mechanism.

6. Arguments for Regulation

Considering the significance of the online industry and the impact which it can have on the traditional banking channels/NBFC sector, it would be prudent to regulate this emerging industry. Regulation would reduce its potential to disrupt the financial sector and throw surprises. As P2P lending promotes alternative forms of finance, where formal finance is unable to reach and also has the potential to soften the lending rates as a result of lower operational costs. Therefore, the importance of these methods of financing needs to be acknowledged. If the sector is left unregulated altogether, there is the risk of unhealthy practices being adopted by one or more players, which may have deleterious consequences.
Section 45S of RBI Act prohibits an individual or a firm or an unincorporated association of individuals from accepting deposits, if his or its business wholly or partly includes any of the activities specified in clause (c) of section 45-I (i.e. activities of a financial institution); or if his or its principal business is that of receiving of deposits under any scheme or arrangement or in any other manner, or lending in any manner. Contravention of Section 45S is an offence punishable under section 58B (5A) of RBI Act. As per the Act, ‘‘deposit’’ includes and shall be deemed always to have included any receipt of money by way of deposit or loan or in any other form, but does not include any amount received from an individual or a firm or an association of individuals not being a body corporate, registered under any enactment relating to money lending which is for the time being in force in any State. Since the borrowers and lenders brought together by a P2P platform could fall within these prohibitions, absence of regulation may lead to perpetrating an illegality.

7. Proposed Regulatory Framework

RBI concludes that a regulatory mechanism would facilitate the creation of an alternative avenue of credit. It proposes to bring the P2P lending platforms under the purview of RBI's regulation by defining P2P platforms as NBFCs under section 45I(f)(iii) of the RBI Act by issuing a notification in consultation with the Government of India. After the notification, RBI can issue directions under sections 45JA and 45L of RBI Act to such platforms regarding registration requirements and prudential norms. Below are the features of the proposed regulation.

7.1. Permitted Activity

Considering the present stage of development, the platform could be registered only as an intermediary. i.e. the borrowing and the lending activity could not be reflected on the Balance Sheet. The platform will be required to ensure that section 45S of the RBI Act is not attracted by its activities. The platforms will be prohibited from giving any assured return either directly or indirectly. The platforms will be allowed to opine on the suitability of a lender and creditworthiness of a borrower. Adequate regulations on advertisements will also be put in place. It will also be mandated that funds will have to necessarily move directly from the lender’s bank account to the borrower’s bank account to obviate the threat of money laundering. The guidelines would also prohibit the platforms being used for any cross-border transaction in view of FEMA provisions relating to transactions between residents and non-residents.

7.2. Prudential Requirements

The prudential requirements will include a minimum capital of Rs 2 crore. With a view to ensure that there is enough skin in the game at a later date, leverage ratio may be prescribed so that the platforms do not expand with indiscriminate leverage. Given that the lenders may include uninformed individuals, prudential limits on maximum contribution by a lender to a borrower/segment of activity could also be specified.

7.3. Governance Requirements

The guidelines in this regard will include fit and proper criteria for promoters, directors and CEO. A reasonable proportion of board members having financial sector background could be suggested. The guidelines may also require the P2P lender to have a brick and mortar place of business in India. The management and operational personnel of the platform would need to be stationed within the country.

7.4. Business Continuity Plan (BCP)

The platforms need to put in place adequate risk management systems for its smooth operations. BCP and back up for the data needs to be put in place since the platform also acts as a custodian of the agreements/cheques etc. In case of failure of the platform to continue its operations, it should have a ‘living will’ or alternative arrangement in the form of an agreement for continuation of its operations.

7.5. Customer Interface

Most of the platforms operating in India provide a credit score for the borrowers using their customized algorithms. Confidentiality of the customer data and data security would be the responsibility of the Platform. Transparency in operations, adequate measures for data confidentiality and minimum disclosures to borrowers and lenders would also be mandated through a fair practices code. The current regulations applicable to other NBFCs will be made applicable to the P2P platforms in regard to recovery practice. The operators would also be mandated to have a proper grievance redress mechanism to deal with complaints from both lenders and borrowers and require reporting to the Board.

7.6. Reporting Requirements

In order to assist monitoring, the platforms will need to submit regular reports on their financial position, loans arranged each quarter, complaints etc. to the Reserve Bank. The Bank may come out with a detailed reporting requirement.

8. Scope of RBI's Regulation

It may be noted here that RBI has powers to regulate entities which are in the form of companies or cooperative societies. However, if the P2P platforms are run by individuals, proprietorship, partnership or Limited Liability Partnerships, it would not fall under the purview of RBI. Hence, it is essential that P2P platforms adopt company structure. The notification can therefore specify that no entity other than a company can undertake this activity. This will render such services provided under any other organisational structure illegal. Alternatively, the other forms of structure may be regulated by the State Governments.

Comments are sought on following aspects of this discussion paper:

Whether there is a felt need for regulating P2P lending platforms?
Is the assessment of P2P lending and risks associated with it adequate?
Are there any other risks which ought to be addressed?
Is the proposed approach to regulating these platforms adequate?
Any other relevant issues pertaining to P2P lending.

9. Endnotes

[1] See: https://www.rbi.org.in/scripts/bs_viewcontent.aspx?Id=3164.

[2] See: http://www.sebi.gov.in/cms/sebi_data/attachdocs/1403005615257.pdf.

10. Author Profile

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/rbi-consultation-paper-on-p2p-lending-summary

April 2016 Newsletter

sunil — 2016-05-10T06:26:09Z

Welcome to the CIS newsletter for April 2016. The key issues we worked on this month included the Aadhaar Act 2016, Standard Essential Patents, cyber security of smart grids, and involvement of international agencies in the smart cities project in India.

Early last year, thanks to the fund raising efforts of a friend of CIS - Suhail Kazi, we received Rs. 1.9 lakhs as donations from 19 individuals. In January this year, we set up an online giving feature on our website which would ease the donation process, but we haven’t got a single donation so far! This could be because many of you may be under a false impression that CIS is very wealthy and does not need more support. Unfortunately, this is no longer true. Today, we are unable to find a single donor who is interested in our Accessibility, Telecom, or RAW programmes. In other words, we need your support. Would you to consider making a small donation to CIS? Click here to donate.

Previous issues of the newsletters can be accessed here: http://cis-india.org/about/newsletters.

Highlights
CIS prepared an FAQ on the Aadhaar / UIDAI project and the Aadhaar (Targeted Delivery of Financial and Other Subsidies, Benefits and Services) Bill, 2016. Further, two infographics were produced to highlight on the questions of "Can the Aadhaar Act 2016 be Classified as a Money Bill?" and "Can the Matters Dealt with in the Aadhaar Act be the Objects of a Money Bill?". NVDA team prepared a report on the progress of the project for the month of April 2016. CIS submitted its comments to the Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion's Discussion Paper on Standard Essential Patents and their Availability on FRAND Terms. CIS has offered its assistance on other matters aimed at developing a suitable policy framework for SEPs and FRAND in India, and, working towards the sustained innovation, manufacture and availability of mobile technologies in India. A summary of the comments can be accessed here. Responses to the Discussion Paper is available here. Rohini Lakshané's paper titled Patents and Mobile Devices in India: An Empirical Survey has been accepted for publication by the Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law. Kiran A.B. in a blog post has documented the availability and openness of data sets in India that are relevant for monitoring the targets under the SDGs. Low-cost Aakash tablet and its previous iterations in India have gone through several phases of technological changes and ideological experiments wrote Sumandro Chattapadhyay and Jahnavi Phalkey in an article published in the Economic and Political Weekly.

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CIS in the News
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CIS gave inputs to the following media coverage:

India's biometric database crosses billion-member mark (AFP and Daily Mail, UK; April 4, 2016).
The Panama Papers and the question of privacy (Big News Network; April 6, 2016). This was originally published by Privacyinternational.org.
Daunting task ahead for investigative agencies with WhatsApp's end-to-end encryption (Neha Alawadhi; Economic Times; April 8, 2016).
PMO’s no to smart cards, insists on Aadhaar (Somesh Jha; Hindu; April 10, 2016).
2014 showed the power of Twitter, now every Indian politician wants a handle (T.V. Jayan, Smitha Verma,Sonia Sarkar and V. Kumara Swamy; Telegraph; April 10, 2016).
Why is the UIDAI cracking down on individuals that hoard Aadhaar data? (Alnoor Peermohamed; Business Standard; April 13, 2016).
You will need a license to create a WhatsApp group in Kashmir (Governance Now; April 19, 2016).
Will Facebook, Twitter relocate servers to India? (Taru Bhatia; Governance Now; April 23, 2016).
Government keeps experts out of cyber security discussions (Amrita Madhukalya; DNA; April 23, 2016).
CCTV plays Sherlock (Raj Shekhar, Arun Dev, V Narayan & A Selvaraj with inputs from Sindhu Kannan and Somreet Bhattacharya; The Times of India; April 24, 2016).

CIS members wrote the following pieces:

Sunil Abraham wrote an article in the July 15 edition of Frontline arguing that the Aadhaar project’s technological design and architecture is an unmitigated disaster and no amount of legal fixes in the Act will make it any better.
Amber Sinha wrote an article in The Wire arguing that the Aaddhaar Act is not a money bill, and the Supreme Court may very well question the decision by the Lok Sabha speaker to classify it as such.
Sumandro Chattapadhyay also wrote on The Wire arguing that "the last chance for a welfare state doesn’t rest in the Aadhaar system."
Subhashish Panigrahi's article on the 8 challenges that Indian language Wikipedias have to overcome was published by Global Voices. The article had earlier been published in the Wire.
Elonnai Hickok and Vanya Rakesh co-authored an article on Cyber Security of Smart Grids in India that was published by Dataquest.
Shyam Ponappa in his monthly column published in the Business Standard tell us that it's time the government accepts that current policies are not enough to bring about Digital India.

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Accessibility & Inclusion
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India has an estimated 70 million persons with disabilities who don't have access to read printed materials due to some form of physical, sensory, cognitive or other disability. As part of our endeavour to make available accessible content for persons with disabilities, we are developing a text-to-speech software in 15 languages with support from the Hans Foundation. The progress made so far in the project can be accessed here.

►NVDA and eSpeak

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Access to Knowledge
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Our Access to Knowledge programme currently consists of two projects. The Pervasive Technologies project, conducted under a grant from the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), aims to conduct research on the complex interplay between low-cost pervasive technologies and intellectual property, in order to encourage the proliferation and development of such technologies as a social good. The Wikipedia project, which is under a grant from the Wikimedia Foundation, is for the growth of Indic language communities and projects by designing community collaborations and partnerships that recruit and cultivate new editors and explore innovative approaches to building projects.

►Pervasive Technologies

Comments

Comments on Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion Discussion Paper on Standard Essential Patents and their Availability on Frand Terms (Anubha Sinha, Nehaa Chaudhari and Rohini Lakshané; April 23, 2016).
Responses to the DIPP's Discussion Paper on SEPs and their Availability on FRAND Terms (Anubha Sinha, Nehaa Chaudhari and Rohini Lakshané; April 23, 2016).
Summary of CIS Comments to DIPP’s Discussion Paper on SEPs and their availability on FRAND terms (Anubha Sinha; April 26, 2016).

Blog Entries

Global Congress 2015 - A Collection of Resources (Pervasive Technologies Team; April 1, 2016).
Compilation of Mobile Phone Patent Litigation Cases in India (Rohini Lakshané; updated on April 15, 2016).
Joining the Dots in India's Big-Ticket Mobile Phone Patent Litigation (Rohini Lakshané; updated on April 29, 2016).
MHRD IPR Chair Series: Information Received from Tezpur University (Karan Tripathi; April 26, 2016).
National IPR Policy Series : Sectoral Innovation Councils on Intellectual Property Rights – RTI Requests + DIPP Responses (Nehaa Chaudhari and Saahil Dama; April 30, 2016). Nisha S. Kumar assisted in compilation of the document.

Participation in Events

Fifth Annual IP Teaching Workshop (Organised by the Centre for Innovation, Intellectual Property and Competition at National Law University Delhi in association with National Academy of Law Teaching, NLU-D; Delhi; March 31 and April 1, 2016). Nehaa Chaudhari was a speaker.
First Round-table on Innovation, IP and Competition (Organized by the Centre for Innovation, Intellectual Property & Competition (CIIPC) at the National Law University, Delhi; India Habitat Centre; New Delhi; April 1-2, 2016). Nehaa Chaudhari and Anubha Sinha attended the round-table.
Brainstorming Workshop on PG Programme on Media Studies for UGC E-Pathshala Programme (Organized by Jamia Milla Islamia; New Delhi; April 5, 2016).
Sensitization Seminar on IPR for Electronics & ICT Sectors (Organized by Andhra Pradesh Technology Development & Promotion Centre (APTDC) of Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), in association with Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeitY); Vishakhapatnam; April 21, 2016).

►Wikipedia

As part of the project grant from the Wikimedia Foundation we have reached out to more than 3500 people across India by organizing more than 100 outreach events and catalysed the release of encyclopaedic and other content under the Creative Commons (CC-BY-3.0) license in four Indian languages (21 books in Telugu, 13 in Odia, 4 volumes of encyclopaedia in Konkani and 6 volumes in Kannada, and 1 book on Odia language history in English).

Work Plan

CIS - A2K Work Plan: July 2016 - June 2017 (CIS-A2K Team; April 2, 2016): We have revised the work plan template taking into account the changed proposal plan sent out by WMF and in light of the feedback that we have received from FDC assessment during last proposal application. The FDC feedback is taken into account at the level of design, RoI and ensuring quality for all our activities.

Article

Eight Challenges Indian-Language Wikipedias Need to Overcome (Subhashish Panigrahi; Global Voices; April 21, 2016). A version of this post was previously published on The Wire.

Media Coverage

Odia gets more space in e-world (Anwesha Ambaly; The Telegraph; April 7, 2016).
Exercise to Correct articles in Tulu Wikipedia begins (Raviprasad Kamila; The Hindu; April 28, 2016).

Event Organized

Tulu Wikipedia Editathon to Improve Quality of Articles in Tulu Wikipedia (Shri Ramakrishna PU College; Mangaluru; April 26 - 30, 2016).

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Openness
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Our work in the Openness programme focuses on open data, especially open government data, open access, open education resources, open knowledge in Indic languages, open media, and open technologies and standards - hardware and software. We approach openness as a cross-cutting principle for knowledge production and distribution, and not as a thing-in-itself.

Monitoring Sustainable Development Goals in India: Availability and Openness of Data (Part II) (Kiran A.B.; April 12, 2016).

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Internet Governance
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As part of its research on privacy and free speech, CIS is engaged with two different projects. The first one (under a grant from Privacy International and IDRC) is on surveillance and freedom of expression (SAFEGUARDS). The second one (under a grant from MacArthur Foundation) is on restrictions that the Indian government has placed on freedom of expression online.

►Cyber Security

Cyber Security of Smart Grids in India (Elonnai Hickok and Vanya Rakesh; April 25, 2016).

►Big Data

Blog Entry

RTI regarding Smart Cities Mission in India (Paul Thottan; April 21, 2016).

►Privacy

Blog Entries

FAQ on the Aadhaar Project and the Bill (Elonnai Hickok, Vanya Rakesh, and Vipul Kharbanda; April 13, 2016).
Aadhaar Act and its Non-compliance with Data Protection Law in India (Vanya Rakesh; April 14, 2016).
Can the Matters Dealt with in the Aadhaar Act be the Objects of a Money Bill? (Pooja Saxena; April 24, 2016).

Articles

Will Aadhaar Act Address India’s Dire Need For a Privacy Law? (Nehaa Chaudhari; Quint; March 31, 2016).
The Last Chance for a Welfare State Doesn’t Rest in the Aadhaar System (Sumandro Chattapadhyay; April 19, 2016).
The Aadhaar Act is Not a Money Bill (Amber Sinha; April 25, 2016).

Participation in Events

RightsCon Silicon Valley 2016 (Organized by RightsCon; March 31 and April 1, 2016). Elonnai Hickok attended the event.
Panel Discussion on UID/ Aadhar act 2016 and its impact on Social, Security (Organized by Students Christian Movement of India at SCM House; Bangalore; April 25, 2016). Sunil Abraham was a panelist.
The Centre for the Study of Law and Governance (CSLG), Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), organised a roundtable discussion on Tuesday, April 26, to discuss the Aadhaar project and Act. Along with Prasanna S, Apar Gupta, and Dr. Chirashree Dasgupta, Sumandro Chattapadhyay was one of the discussants.
Aadhaar by Numbers (Organized by National Institute of Public Finance and Policy; New Delhi; April 29, 2016). Sunil Abraham was a speaker.

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Telecom
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CIS is involved in promoting access and accessibility to telecommunications services and resources, and has provided inputs to ongoing policy discussions and consultation papers published by TRAI. It has prepared reports on unlicensed spectrum and accessibility of mobile phones for persons with disabilities and also works with the USOF to include funding projects for persons with disabilities in its mandate:

Article

Breakthroughs Needed For Digital India (Shyam Ponappa; Business Standard; April 6, 2016 and Organizing India BlogSpot; April 7, 2016).

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Researchers at Work
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The Researchers at Work (RAW) programme is an interdisciplinary research initiative driven by an emerging need to understand the reconfigurations of social practices and structures through the Internet and digital media technologies, and vice versa. It aims to produce local and contextual accounts of interactions, negotiations, and resolutions between the Internet, and socio-material and geo-political processes:

Article

Buying into the Aakash Dream - A Tablet’s Tale of Mass Education (Sumandro Chattapadhyay and Jahnavi Phalkey; Economic & Political Weekly; April 23, 2016).

Announcement

Call for Proposal: Big Data for Development – Initial Field Studies (Sumandro Chattapadhyay; April 29, 2016).

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About CIS
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The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) is a non-profit organisation that undertakes interdisciplinary research on internet and digital technologies from policy and academic perspectives. The areas of focus include digital accessibility for persons with diverse abilities, access to knowledge, intellectual property rights, openness (including open data, free and open source software, open standards, open access, open educational resources, and open video), internet governance, telecommunication reform, digital privacy, and cyber-security. The academic research at CIS seeks to understand the reconfigurations of social and cultural processes and structures as mediated through the internet and digital media technologies.

► Follow us elsewhere

Twitter: http://twitter.com/cis_india
Twitter - Access to Knowledge: https://twitter.com/CISA2K
Twitter - Information Policy: https://twitter.com/CIS_InfoPolicy
Facebook - Access to Knowledge: https://www.facebook.com/cisa2k
E-Mail - Access to Knowledge: a2k@cis-india.org
E-Mail - Researchers at Work: raw@cis-india.org
List - Researchers at Work: https://lists.ghserv.net/mailman/listinfo/researchers

► Support Us

Please help us defend consumer and citizen rights on the Internet! Write a cheque in favour of 'The Centre for Internet and Society' and mail it to us at No. 194, 2nd 'C' Cross, Domlur, 2nd Stage, Bengaluru - 5600 71.

► Request for Collaboration

We invite researchers, practitioners, artists, and theoreticians, both organisationally and as individuals, to engage with us on topics related internet and society, and improve our collective understanding of this field. To discuss such possibilities, please write to Sunil Abraham, Executive Director, at sunil@cis-india.org (for policy research), or Sumandro Chattapadhyay, Research Director, at sumandro@cis-india.org (for academic research), with an indication of the form and the content of the collaboration you might be interested in. To discuss collaborations on Indic language Wikipedia projects, write to Tanveer Hasan, Programme Officer, at tanveer@cis-india.org.

CIS is grateful to its primary donor the Kusuma Trust founded by Anurag Dikshit and Soma Pujari, philanthropists of Indian origin for its core funding and support for most of its projects. CIS is also grateful to its other donors, Wikimedia Foundation, Ford Foundation, Privacy International, UK, Hans Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, and IDRC for funding its various projects.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/april-2016-newsletter

Call for Proposal: Big Data for Development – Initial Field Studies

sumandro — 2016-04-28T07:28:23Z

The Centre for Internet and Society, as part of a project with the University of Manchester and University of Sheffield, is inviting calls from researchers to undertake a brief initial study of a specific instance of use of big data for development in India. This is an exercise to build preliminary understanding of the landscape of big data for development in India, identify key research questions and priorities, and start developing connections with researchers interested in the field. The studies will be 6 weeks long - running from May to June 2016 - and the researchers are expected to produce a 3,000 words long report. We will support three field studies.

Study Process and Deliverable

The researcher is expected to propose and undertake a 6 weeks long study – starting from May 09 and ending on June 17 – of an instance of big data is being used to inform, target, operationalise, monitor, or support developmental and/or humanitarian activity in India.

During this period, the researcher is expected to interview 4-5 persons directly involved in the big data for development project concerned, and 2-3 other persons to get a wider sense of the context of the project.

By the end of the 6 weeks period, the researcher is expected to submit a 3,000 words long report. The report will be commented upon by Prof. Richard Heeks (University of Manchester), Dr. Christopher Foster (University of Sheffield), and Sumandro Chattapadhyay (CIS), and revised accordingly during the last weeks of June.

The individual reports will be published independently and as part of the larger project report, under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. The authors will be attributed appropriately.

All researchers will take part in a work-in-progress meeting (held over internet) during last week of May or first week of June.

Research Questions

The interviews will focus on the following topics:

Innovation: What is the nature of the innovation being done by the use of big data? What technical systems and/or applications are being deployed and replaced/superceded? Who are key actors in this innovation process?
Implementation: What is the grounded experience of implementing the big data technology? What are the key enablers and constraints being faced, both in the data collection stage, and the analysis and decision making stage?
Value: What is the value being created, and how is it understood? Is it organisational value, or socio-economic value? Who is gaining this value?
Ethics: What ethical concerns are emerging? Do they involve concerns about data quality, representation, privacy, or security? Is there concerns about a data divide being created among people who are represented in data and who are not, or among people who can gain value from the data and who cannot?

Application, Eligibility, and Remuneration

Please submit the following documents to apply:

Proposal: A one page note on the big data for development project that you would like to study. Please share a brief description of the project and how you will study it, including the name/designation of key people you will speak to.
Writing Sample: An article or a collection of articles, of not more than 8,000 words length in total.
CV: A short CV, two pages or less.

Please e-mail the documents to raw[at]cis-india[dot]org by Wednesday, May 04, 2016.

There is no eligibility criteria for submitting proposals. However, we will prioritise researchers living and studying big data for development projects in non X-class cities, that is in cities other than Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Chennai, Delhi, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Mumbai, and Pune.

We will select three researchers, and will offer Rs. 35,000 to each of them for this study. The amount will be paid in a single installment, after the draft field study report is submitted for comments.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/jobs/call-for-proposal-big-data-for-development-field-studies

Buying into the Aakash Dream - A Tablet’s Tale of Mass Education

sumandro — 2016-04-25T08:04:28Z

The low-cost Aakash tablet and its previous iterations in India have gone through several phases of technological changes and ideological experiments. Did the government prioritise familiarity and literacy about personal technological devices over the promise of quality mass education generated by low-cost devices? This article by Sumandro Chattapadhyay and Jahnavi Phalkey (India Institute, King's College London) was published by EPW in the Web Exclusive section. Here is the unabridged version of the article.

Originally published by Economic and Political Weekly on April 23, 2016. Below is the unabridged version.

This research note is based on a project conducted as part of the Max Weber Foundation’s Transnational Research Group on "Poverty and Education in India," and draws from a paper recently published by the authors in History and Technology.

Introduction

The Aakash tablet, hailed as the vanguard of India's “tablet revolution,” was unveiled at the United Nations. It was to showcase India's technological prowess but was quickly lamented as a failed “dream,” and as India's “object lesson” in how not to do technological innovation. The so-called failure of the device became a metonym for the government that backed it, and for the technology establishment of the country. While our longer paper [1] questions this notion of “failure,” in this note we wish to highlight the role played by the discourse and experiments in technologies of mass education in creating the practical context and the market conditions for low-cost tablets in India.

A 2011 report by the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) claimed that although the initiation of the Aakash tablet project met with “skepticism and scorn,” over time it not only developed an affordable device aimed at students in India, but has produced an entirely new market niche of sub-100 USD tablets [2]. This ambitious statement appears to be vindicated by a recent report by IDC, an economic intelligence company, on the tablet market in India. The report notes that the market has grown in the previous year at an annual rate of 8.2%. More importantly, the two companies leading in market share are DataWind (20.7%) and Samsung (15.8%) [3]. Incidentally, after the first quarter of 2014, Samsung had the largest (22.5%) and DataWind the fourth largest (6.8%) share [4]. What is noteworthy here is not the rise of DataWind as the leading seller of tablets alone, but that it is MHRD that heralded this creation of a market niche in India for affordable tablets.

Broadcasting Education: Satellite to Internet

On May 30, 1974, American National Aeronautics and Space Agency (NASA) launched an ATS-6 satellite that formed the central infrastructural component of the Satellite Instructional Television Experiment (SITE), one of the early initiatives to harness communication technology for primary and adult education. The SITE project involved broadcasting educational and informational audio-visual content, produced by All India Radio and Television, directly to televisions across 2400 selected villages located in Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa, and Rajasthan. Operating from August 01, 1975 to July 31, 1976, the Experiment was led by Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), and was supported by UNESCO, UNDP, UNCF, and International Telecommunication Union [5].

The objective of the SITE project was inspired directly by the importance given to skill-development oriented higher education and adult education in the report of the first Education Commission (1964–1966). However, as Asif Siddiqi notes in a recent publication, the project performed a crucial task of establishing the Indian space research programme through a direct alliance with NASA, which held special geopolitical significance given the Chinese nuclear tests of 1964 [6].

This experiment paved the way for development of INSAT, the first Indian satellite. The entanglement of the Indian space programme with the idea of national-level technological infrastructure for education has continued since. The EDUSAT, launched in 2004, was a collaborative project between ISRO and MHRD to drive satellite-based education across disadvantaged and remote regions of the country. In an audit report in 2013, however, the Department of Space declared that the project has failed, and highlighted three lacks in particular: network connectivity, content generation, and management structure [7].

The earliest initiatives in India to put computers in schools, supplementing and supplanting the television screens, began in the 1980s. These efforts pre-dated extensive terrestrial communication fiber networks and relied almost completely upon the success of the Indian space programme. The UGC Countrywide Classroom, Computer Literacy and Studies in Schools, and Computer Literacy and Awareness Programme are the key examples from this time. The revised Programme of Action of the National Policy on Education (1986) reiterated the need for increased attention to upgrading education technology infrastructure, as well as the development of electronic content for the same. This led to the initiation of the ICT@Schools scheme beginning with the eighth Five Year Plan (1993-1998). Even after twenty years of the introduction of computers in schools across India, a 2006 report on education technology by the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) noted that computer-based teaching and learning in an actual classroom setting remains more of a 'spectator sport' [8].

With the advent of the internet, the MHRD started experimenting with internet-based delivery of distance education from 2003, beginning with the National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL). It did so alongside satellite-based distribution of educational content. NPTEL involved five Indian Institutes of Technology (Bombay, Delhi, Kanpur, Kharagpur, and Madras) developing openly available course materials for more than one hundred undergraduate courses in five engineering subjects, as well as courses in basic science. These course materials were later made part of the online learning portal called 'Sakshat,' which eventually became one of the pillars of the National Mission on Education through Information and Communication Technologies (NMEICT), initiated during the 11th Five Year Plan (2007–2012). This portal marked the completion of a conceptual and technological shift from the satellite-based models of delivery of educational content, to an internet-based one.

Making and Un-making of the Aakash Tablet

With NMEICT, large-scale education technology initiatives of the Indian state moved away from the earlier emphasis on primary education and school-oriented computer literacy, to that on higher education and aids for self-learning. The plan for an affordable tablet computer was announced in mid-2010 as part of this Mission. This “low-cost access-cum-computing device” was aimed at bypassing the institutional, bureaucratic, and infrastructural barriers to access to quality higher education. It’s main audience were students in disadvantaged regions and non-elite institutions, as well as self-learners. The actualisation the device, however, were continuously delayed and blocked by conflicts between the governmental and non-governmental actors, strong skepticism from the media, and several changes in the state's approach to the project.

The first approach to the project was an international company that approached the MHRD in 2006, with a proposal to sell educational laptops for school students at 100 USD each. N.K. Sinha, then Mission Director of NMEICT, argued against the purchase. The MHRD saw this as an opportunity for developing an indigenous low-cost computer, and initiated a competition among the IITs to come up with a prototype for this device, which was won by the IIT Kanpur team led by Prof. Prem Kumar Kalra, then Professor and Head of the Department of Electrical Engineering. The first publicly exhibited (2010) prototype of the device was the one developed in IIT Kanpur, which was priced initially at 35 USD.

The MHRD, however, soon decided to buy the device from a commercial manufacturer. The responsibility of procurement and testing went to IIT Rajasthan, under the leadership of Prof. Kalra who joined the newly established institution as its first Director. After the contract with HCL Infosystems was called off in January 2011, DataWind, a Canada and UK based company specialising in internet-access devices, won the new tender to produce the first version of the device. On 5 October 2011, the first version of tablet was launched, priced at Rs 2,500, and co-branded as Aakash and Ubislate: respectively for those bought and redistributed at a subsidised rate by MHRD, and those sold commercially by DataWind [9].

An early controversy about the tablet, apart from its technical capabilities, was around the claim that they were produced and assembled in China. DataWind rejected the allegations and claimed that all the devices were assembled by Quad Electronics in its factory in Secunderabad, (then Andhra Pradesh). Within a year, however, DataWind got involved in serious conflict with IIT Rajasthan on one hand, and Quad Electronics on the other. The MHRD intervened again to change the approach by bringing in IIT Bombay (March 2012) as the new procuring and testing agency, thus removing IIT Rajasthan from the project. DataWind also found a new partner in VMC Systems, who started assembling the “kits” imported from China in its establishments in Amritsar and Delhi.

With M. M. Pallam Raju becoming the Minister of Human Resource Development in late 2012 by succeeding Kapil Sibal, one might say, the Aakash project gradually moved to what we know as its final form. At first, it was suggested that the state should entirely move out of the business of providing low-cost tablets as there is already a vibrant market. Later on, and with thought leadership from Prof. Rajat Moona, Director General of the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing, and others, it was decided that “Aakash” would become a brand name available for commercial manufacturers of affordable tablets that satisfy a minimum set of technical specifications [10]. The first draft of the specifications list was published in June 2013. The tendering process, however, got delayed, and eventually came to a near-permanent pause with the General Elections in 2014.

As of November 2015, the MHRD has again shown interest in the idea of a state-subsidised tablet computer for education. The tablet was now called Udaan, and aimed at girl students at the higher secondary level, priced at Rs. 10,000 (against Rs. 2,500 of Aakash), and distributed only to 1,000 students.

Government Dream and Device Desire

In an interview in late 2013, Kapil Sibal (then Union Minister of Communication and Information Technology, former Union Minister of Human Resource Development) shared that "[the] Aakash tablet was [his] dream but it was not fulfilled" [11]. Sibal, undoubtedly the key political driver of the project, in his admission to failure, raises deep concerns about the present state and the future of the technological infrastructure - and the imagination - for mass education in the country.

Tracing the transition of these technologies from SITE to Aakash, we continously find it difficult to delineate the state’s transforming and transformative agenda of mass education from that of building technological capability. At times, though, we wondered if the agenda for mass education did not become one that served the purpose of generating, for lack of a better phrase, a certain familiarity and literacy about personal technological devices among the population. The motivations and goals that informed these mammoth projects become more and more difficult to decipher when we look at the relatively poor attention given to the production of content. Careful monitoring and documentation of how such content is being received and utilised by the actual learners and their educators was not prioritised; and whenever undertaken, such exercises revealed the deep lack of pedagogic concerns at the heart of these education technology programmes.

Alongside the overwhelming narrative of failure, however, we cannot ignore the remarkable, but quiet, success of the project in normalising and framing the tablet computer as familiar, and almost essential, object for personal learning and development. Apart from presenting the tablet computer as an everyday media object, almost similar to the way television entered the households, the NMEICT and the Aakash project played a crucial role in normalising the notion of online self-learning, and thus that of the online, in the Indian public imagination. In an insightful comment, Suneet Singh Tuli, CEO of DataWind, remarked that the Aakash tablet was not an “iPad for the poor”, it was the “the computer and Internet of the masses” – it was not selling a demo version of the real thing, it was shaping the very imagination [12].

These stories, together, conspire to make us wonder if all this eventually amounts to create desires for devices; and that the educational and developmental rhetoric helped frame electronic devices as everyday and household objects. The consequences, as we see, cannot exactly be called unintended.

References

[1] Phalkey, Jahnavi and Sumandro Chattapadhyay. "The Aakash Tablet and Technological Imaginaries of Mass Education in Contemporary India." History and Technology, Vol. 31, No. 4, 2015. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07341512.2015.1136142.

[2] Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India. The History of Aakash Low Cost Access cum Computing Device. Sakshat, October 05, 2011. http://archive.sakshat.ac.in/pdf/Final_Note_Aakash.pdf.

[3] International Data Corporation. "India Tablet Market Posts 8.2 percentage Annual Growth in 2015." March 21 (2016). http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prAP41123816.

[4] Press Trust of India. "Tablet Market in India Shrank 32 Percent in Q1 2014 on YoY Basis: IDC." Gadgets 360, NDTV. May 28, 2014. http://gadgets.ndtv.com/tablets/news/tablet-market-in-india-shrank-32-percent-in-q1-2014-on-yoy-basis-idc-532253.

[5] Chander, Romesh, and Kiran Karnik. Planning for Satellite Broadcasting: The Indian Instructional Television Experiment. Paris: The Unesco Press, 1976.

[6] Siddiqi, Asif. "Making Space for the Nation: Satellite Television, Indian Scientific Elites, and the Cold War." Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Vol. 35, No. 1, 2015: 35–49./p>

[7] Department of Space. Comptroller and Auditor General of India, Government of India. Report No. 22 of 2013 - Compliance Audit on Union Government (Scientific and Environmental Ministries/ Departments). New Delhi: Government of India, 2013: 23–53.

[8] National Council of Educational Research and Training. Position Paper of National Focus Group on Educational Technology. Government of India, New Delhi, 2006, 6.

[9] Press Information Bureau, Government of India. 2011. “Shri Kapil Sibal Launches ‘Aakash’, Low Cost Access Device.” Press Information Bureau, October 05. http://pib.nic.in/newsite/PrintRelease.aspx?relid=76476.

[10] Agarwal, Surabhi. 2013. “Govt Plans to License ‘Brand Aakash.’” Business Standard, June 19. http://www.businessstandard.com/article/technology/govtplanstolicensebrandaakash 113061800902_1.html.

[11] Press Trust of India. "Kapil Sibal: Aakash Tablet is My Unfulfilled Dream." Financial Express, December 24, 2013. http://www.financialexpress.com/news/kapilsibalaakashtabletismyunfulfilleddream/1211284/0.

[12] Kurup, Saira. 2011. “We Want to Target the Billion Indians who are Cut off.” Times of India, October 09. http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/stoi/deepfocus/WewanttotargetthebillionIndianswhoarecutoff/articleshow/10284832.cms.

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Studying Digital Creative Industries in India: Initial Questions

sneha-pp — 2016-03-18T13:55:56Z

This brief overview of the discourse around creative industries is an attempt to explore some ways of identifying what could be digital creative industries in India, and the questions they raise and problematize for us in terms of cultural expression, knowledge production, creativity and labour. The term ‘creative industries’ has been around for a while now, but with the advent of the digital, and with interest from different sectors, especially with a focus on policy and economic development, it would be essential to critically examine the discourse around the term, and see where it may be changing to open up new possibilities, particularly for the arts, humanities and design.

Introduction

The term ‘creative industries’ has been popular for more than two decades now, and continues to remain an important sector for research and development, as indicated by several shifts in policy and public discourse in the last few years. A significant move has been the foregrounding of creativity and knowledge as important resources for economic growth and social well–being. The term has a connection with the older and more specific term ‘cultural industries’, with its origins in the Frankfurt School [1] of theory, but has developed as part of a larger discourse around the creative economy/knowledge economy. First used in Australia in 1994 as part of a report titled Creative Nation [2], it became more widely recognized in the following years with the setting up of the Creative Industries Task Force by the United Kingdom’s Department of Culture, Media and Sport in 1997.The UNESCO Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions (2005) [3] was perhaps the most prominent global effort in recognizing and taking steps towards fostering the growth of creativity and cultural production as part of sustainable development.

Following this there have been several other initiatives across the world, most noticeably in the Anglo-American context, that have built upon this framework to ease and facilitate cross-cultural flows and diversity in the circulation of information, labour and goods. Increasingly, the attempt now is to understand the relevance of these efforts in the digital age, where several advancements in technology and the ubiquitous presence of the internet continue to determine the creation, circulation and consumption of cultural commodities. This blog post is an attempt to outline some initial thoughts on what could be the possibilities of studying ‘digital’ creative industries in India. The digital is an inherent aspect of much cultural and creative expression today, given the steady transition from analogue to digital and the increased presence of internet in almost every domain. What would constitute creative digital industries in the present moment, how do they determine the larger course of cultural production, and pose new questions for labour, commodities, creativity and technology more broadly are some of the questions explored here.

According to the UN Creative Economy Report 2010 [4] the creative industries:

are the cycles of creation, production and distribution of goods and services that use creativity and intellectual capital as primary inputs;
constitute a set of knowledge-based activities, focused on but not limited to arts, potentially generating revenues from trade and intellectual property rights;
comprise tangible products and intangible intellectual or artistic services with creative content, economic value and market objectives;
stand at the crossroads of the artisan, services and industrial sectors; and
constitute a new dynamic sector in world trade.

As the report mentions, these are ‘evolving’ concepts and definitions, and just the number of areas that can come within the purview of the creative industries has increased greatly in the last decade. The report classifies creative industries under four different models as illustrated here:

Source: UN Creative Economy Report 2010.

Creative Industries in India

In India, there has been a keen interest in the potential of creativity as a resource, although creative industries may not be a popularly used term. From a policy perspective it is largely in terms of opportunities for economic growth, and more recently the potential for innovation and entrepreneurship, as seen in the Niti Aayog report presented in 2015 [5], which says that:

the committee proposes using digital platforms to encourage innovation, reforming the educational system to encourage creativity and upskilling workers to make them more employable, improving the ease of doing business, and strengthening intellectual property rights. Finally, the committee also proposes a number of measures to change cultural biases and attitudes towards entrepreneurship in the long-term, including attaching entrepreneurship to large scale economic and social programs, promoting new high-potential sectors via the government’s “Make in India” campaign, fostering a culture of coordination and collaboration, attempting to redefine cultural notions of success, and tying entrepreneurship with the social inclusion agenda.

The report therefore reflects an interest in harnessing creativity or creative labour as a significant factor in fostering innovation and entrepreneurship, and in some sense also expanding the scope of such entrepreneurship by tying it with social inclusion and encouraging collaboration. What this also has implications then is for educational reform, capacity-building and upskilling for increased employability and better livelihoods, something that requires a systemic and focused effort spread over time. The report also explicitly speaks of strengthening an existing intellectual property regime, which also has been a rather dominant framework for the creative industries discourse from a policy perspective. While there is a need to focus on growth and innovation, a perceived objective of IP, the easy conflation of the two is problematic. Further, the role of IPR in fostering innovation and socio-economic development, as reflected in the draft National IPR policy (2014) [6] is contentious, as responses to the draft have pointed out [7]. It would also be imperative to understand better the ‘cultural notions of success’ and how these would also impact the creative industries discourse in India.

As part of a large research initiative titled Culture: Industries and Diversity in Asia (CIDASIA) [8] spread over two years, the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society Bangalore worked on some of the pertinent questions that emerged out of the creative industries discourse in India and the sub-continent. In a report produced as part of this initiative creative industries are described as:

[T]he vast sector that has emerged with the arrival of modern technologies (emphasis as in the original) and forms of mass reproduction since the colonial period. This sector has now become an important site of intervention for both governments such as in UK, Australia and India and international agencies such as the United Nations.

Further, about the programme the report says:

The initiative attempts to assess the viability of international and government policies for cultural and creative industries and thus lay the groundwork for a hitherto unprecedented intervention of philanthropic organizations in the domain. We specifically focus on culture industries through the node of ‘livelihoods’ that we see as inextricably tied to this sector.

The importance of the question of livelihood to the growth in culture industries remains even today, as they are a source of employment for a vast section of society, mostly in rural areas, and often fall into what is called the unorganized sector. Low capital investment and the disputable legality of many of these industries however, make this connection a complicated one, as pointed out by the CIDASIA research. The study critiqued existing models of creative and cultural industries which emphasized copyright and intellectual property rights (IPR) as safeguards of livelihood and identity, a rather contentious connection given the presence of a large underground economy based on creative labour, which is also often migrant in nature. Other initiatives in the programme included a consultation to rethink the existing debates around cultural policy and diversity, with a focus on the rights of marginalized people, rights in the domain of mass culture, copyright and IPR. Diminishing spaces for cultural or political-artistic performances, and the role of creative cities in fostering such spaces was another area of concern.

There were several learnings from these initiatives about the nature of creative industries (audio-visual media including film and television), the conflation and overlap with culture industries (including craft and legacy industries) and the complex relationship between the two, and how the latter benefits from the first. The question of livelihoods, particularly those of non-citizens, or the migrant is an important one, for it highlights the cultural visibility of these industries, and more importantly establishes the presence of an underground economy that produces goods of high economic value, using cheap labour. Policy reforms, especially with respect to IPR and any regulation of these industries would need to take into account these features. The convergence of difference forms of cultural production with the growth of new media technologies, in particular is a pertinent question. Along with growing concerns around piracy, growth of new kinds of content, exclusivity and distribution become important factors here. The availability of capital and technology, and a growing global presence has also changed dramatically the nature of several creative industries, such as media, entertainment and advertising, but also brought with it challenges of finding creative and sustainable business models [9]. The problem of cultural impenetrability, or the difficulty of certain commodities to find a market in certain countries was also brought up as part of a study on the Korean wave in India. The translation of cultural worth into economic value, here studied through an examination of the cinema as cultural object, produced interesting observations in addressing the commodification of these objects and understanding the problem of value in this context [10]. The role of technology in the growth of the creative industries was an inherent aspect of all these studies, with factors such as context, conditions and quality of access, and the need to understand the problem of the 'last mile' as a conceptual and cultural problem, rather than a technological one, being emphasized in these findings [11].

Creative Labour?

The importance of the question of livelihood to the growth in culture industries remains even today, as they are a source of employment for a vast section of society, mostly in rural areas, and often fall into what is called the unorganized sector. Low capital investment and the disputable legality of many of these industries however, make this connection a complicated one, as pointed out by the CIDASIA research. The study also critiqued existing models of creative and cultural industries which emphasized copyright and intellectual property rights (IPR) as safeguards of livelihood and identity, a rather contentious connection given the presence of a large underground economy based on creative labour, which is also often migrant in nature. Other initiatives in the programme included a consultation to rethink the existing debates around cultural policy and diversity, with a focus on the rights of marginalized people, rights in the domain of mass culture, copyright and IPR. Diminishing spaces for cultural or political-artistic performances, and the role of creative cities in fostering such spaces was another area of concern.

In the last decade alone, the internet and digital technologies have grown at an exponential pace in India. Creative industries have been driven greatly by advancements in technology, and the role of the digital here then becomes an important aspect of the discourse, in terms of either a space, object or context. The term itself has drawn different kinds of criticism, beginning with the juxtaposition of creativity and industry, or the ‘economisation of culture’, as another product of contemporary capitalism, a critique that stems from the Frankfurt School. The problems are several, as outlined here by Andrew Ross [12]:

It may be too early to predict the ultimate fate of the paradigm. But sceptics have already prepared the way for its demise:: it will not generate jobs; it is a recipe for magnifying patterns of class polarisation; its function as a cover for the corporate intellectual property (IP) grab will become all too apparent; its urban development focus will price out the very creatives on whose labour it depends; its reliance on self-promoting rhetoric runs far in advance of its proven impact; its cookie-cutter approach to economic development does violence to regional specificity; its adoption of an instrumental value of creativity will cheapen the true worth of artistic creation.2 Still others are inclined simply to see the new policy rubric as ‘old wine in new bottles’ – a glib production of spin-happy New Labourites, hot for naked marketization but mindful of the need for socially acceptable dress. For those who take a longer, more orthodox Marxist view, the turn toward creative industries is surely a further symptom of an accumulation regime at the end of its effective rule, spent as a productive force, awash in financial speculation, and obsessed with imagery, rhetoric and display.

Similar concerns may be highlighted in the Indian context as well, where the employability of many in creative fields of work, which often fall under the informal or unorganized sector, has always been fraught with uncertainty. The access to cultural and social capital also defines the discourse in a certain manner, as largely urban-centric and focused around a particular class. Education, training and capacity-building efforts in creative fields, and access to these are an important factor that requires further exploration. As reflected in the discussions above, the prevalent imagination of cultural and creative industries still focusses on IPR and socio-economic development of certain sectors of the knowledge economy, therefore making invisible other kinds of labour. The appropriation of the term itself to focus on innovation in certain sectors, at the cost of others, and streamlining and regulation of these in some way would be another aspect of concern. More importantly, the definition of creativity, as beyond skilling for certain kinds of work also needs to be emphasized in these discussions.

Key Questions

Whether these are still pertinent criticisms now is a question, and more importantly, what would be new ways to frame the creative industries debate today would be a relevant starting point of engagement. The following are some questions that could be useful in mapping the creative industries discourse and how it could be thought about today, post the digital turn:

What are digital creative industries? Is it possible to identify a smaller subset of industries that would come within the purview of this term, or is it another entry point into the creative industries discourse in India, where the digital is all pervasive? What are new kinds of creative industries that are heavily and/or purely reliant on the internet and digital technologies?
Does the digital add a new perspective/dimension to how we theorise the notion of creative labour, because of the manner in which it affects, or determines creative expressions in the present, on the internet and more broadly in the digital? More importantly, do we need to critically think about a definition of creativity itself, today within the digital context? How do we then understand questions of precarity in working conditions, innovation and entrepreneurship in this space?
Who is the creative subject? Is it possible to understand such a subject outside of the very Eurocentric discourse around creativity and ‘creation’, which paints the creator as hegemonic in some sense? Another new way to reframe the livelihoods question is to understand the creative worker/knowledge worker, and how to think of these distinctions. What are the new ways to understand this debate?
The discourse around creative industries has largely been framed within the context of the intellectual property rights, and as a method to ensure the stability of the IPR regime. Given the changes, and many nuances to the IPR debates in the last few years, and the growth of the Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) movement, it would be useful to understand the growth of creative digital industries in this context.
What does this tell us about a growing digital economy in India? Creative industries would raise interesting questions about the fostering of a digital economy in India, and the many ways in which it determines cultural production in the rest of the world.

Endnotes

[1] Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, 'The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,' 1944. https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/adorno/1944/culture-industry.htm.

[2] See: http://apo.org.au/resource/creative-nation-commonwealth-cultural-policy-october-1994.

[3] See: http://portal.unesco.org/en/ev.php-URL_ID=31038&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html.

[4] See: http://unctad.org/en/Docs/ditctab20103_en.pdf.

[5] See: http://niti.gov.in/mgov_file/report%20of%20the%20expert%20committee.pdf.

[6] See: http://dipp.nic.in/English/Schemes/Intellectual_Property_Rights/IPR_Policy_24December2014.pdf.

[7] For more on this see: 'Comments on the First Draft Of The National IPR Policy' submitted by the Centre for Internet and Society, 2015 http://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/cis-comments_first-draft-of-national-ipr-stategy.pdf, and 'SpicyIP Tidbit: New IPR Policy in 2 months' by Balaji Subramanian, SpicyIP, October 2015, http://spicyip.com/2015/10/spicyip-tidbit-new-ipr-policy-in-2-months.html.

[8] See: http://cscs.res.in/irps/cidasia-1.

[9] S. Ananth, 'Business of Culture in India,' 2008. http://cscs.res.in/dataarchive/textfiles/textfile.2009-12-18.9970782136.

[10]'When The Host Arrived: A Report on the Problems and Prospects for the Exchange of Popular Cultural Commodities with India,' 2008. http://cscs.res.in/dataarchive/textfiles/textfile.2009-07-17.9853066637/file.

[11]Ashish Rajadhyaksha, 'The Last Cultural Mile' (Bangalore: Centre for Internet and Society, 2011) http://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/the-last-cultural-mile/the-last-cultural-mile-blog-old.

[12] Andrew Ross, 'Nice Work of You Can get it: The Mercurial Career of Creative Industries Policy,' in MyCreativity Reader. Eds. Geert Lovink and Ned Rossiter (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2007).

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The Aakash Tablet and Technological Imaginaries of Mass Education in Contemporary India (Excerpt)

sumandro — 2016-02-14T10:11:09Z

In a recently published paper, Jahnavi Phalkey and Sumandro Chattapadhyay explore public initiatives in technological solutions for educating the poor and the disadvantaged in independent India. Here is an edited excerpt from the paper that traces the recent history of technological solutions for mass education and unpacking the narrative of ‘failure’ that is associated with the Aakash experiment.

Students at Pardada Pardadi Education Society in Anupshahr, Uttar Pradesh, use the Aakash tablet in class as part of a pilot project introducing the low-cost computer into rural schools. Photograph by Sonali Campion, April 09, 2013: https://www.flickr.com/photos/sonalicampion/9449250639/.

In 2010, the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) of the Government of India launched a set of prototype devices of an affordable tablet computer, the development and production of which were to be supported by the Ministry as part of its larger ICTs for education project. This device later came to be known as the “Aakash” tablet, and the project went through several iterations, between 2010 and 2014, of not only technological re-designs, but also institutional arrangements to design, develop, manufacture, test, and procure the devices.

Technological Solutions for Mass Education

Our exploration of technological solutions for mass education in India has taken us through a not-so-linear history of projects that have informed the imagination and making of the Aakash project. This include the Satellite Instructional Television Experiment, or SITE (1975); University Grants Commission-led Countrywide Classroom project (1984 -); the Simputer, the first hand-held device developed in India (1998); the Hole in the Wall project developed and led by Sugata Mitra (1999); the Government of India-led EDUSAT (2004); National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning (2003); and finally, a national online education portal named Sakshat (2006). The Satellite Instructional Television Experiment itself terminated rather quickly, but it led to several versions of television based instruction programmes, most notably aimed at higher secondary and university students. Instruction in the broadcast-format continues to date, even after the arrival of the internet and the fact it has become the preferred medium for the Indian state. The television has not been replaced, but certainly shadowed by a variety of internet access and computing devices.

Aakash, a “Low Cost Access-Cum-Computing Device”

An early official description of the then-nameless tablet as a “low cost access-cum-computing device” is noteworthy [1]. It is difficult to imagine a contemporary computing device that does not also function as an access device (say, to the internet). Where does the need for calling it an “access-cum-computing” device come from? It comes, perhaps, from the hierarchy of priority – the device is primarily an access device, and secondarily can perform the function of a general-purpose computer. An archaeological reading of the assumptions of learning processes embodied in this device reveals an earlier layer of thinking – that of broadcasting educational programmes to television sets via satellite connection. Labelling it as “access-cum-computing” frames the object as being shaped by the residue of the Indian state’s education technological experiences of the past, including that of the SITE initiative.

“[The] Aakash tablet was my dream but it was not fulfilled”

Throughout the short history of the Aakash device, the verdict of “failed innovation” figures prominently – from the early failure of "Sakshat" [2], to allegations of the Chinese origin of the Aakash device [3], to manufacturing troubles and under-production of the device [4], to criticisms of the tablet’s built quality and computing capacity [5], to mistrust and failed collaborations between parties involved in its production [6], and intra-governmental criticisms of the implementation process [7]. Moreover, there remained a continuous tension within the government itself regarding the necessity of the project, especially fuelled by (and fuelling) the image of the project as being driven by the dreams of a specific minister [8].

To simply describe the Aakash project’s failure as one due to the unbearable heaviness of functions ranging from the technical to the symbolic and political is to fall short of a full explanation. Alongside that narrative of failure, it is critical to foreground the quiet success of the project in establishing the tablet computer as a near-essential and familiarised everyday object for access to educational material. There is an alarming accuracy in the MHRD claim that the Aakash project established a sub $100 tablet market in India – it did, even if it was not for the device they wanted to promote [9].

The Device is the Desire

We observe that the Aakash project, as well as the ones preceding it, have been driven primarily by a desire to scale up the provision of education. The initiatives towards building delivery infrastructures for such mass-scale provision of education has almost always been accompanied by a larger desire for developing capabilities in space exploration, communication, and computing – the key technologies of twentieth century geopolitics. Our study of the manufacturing of the Aakash tablet, and its surrounding discourses, foreground the technological imagination of the state after liberalisation in India (1991), and its unique arrangements and efforts to create domestic capability of technological innovation in a context of globalised production and communication networks. We see our role as one of recovering the work of technology in the history of education as understood through the interactions between the state, academia, and industry.

Archival Research in (Increasingly) Digital India

Documenting the project has been an interesting historical exercise. We have been attentive to documents disappearing from their online locations. One remarkable possibility for archival research opened up by the internet is the (limited, and often uncertain) ability to access materials that are not presently available on a website, but were part of it in the past. This possibility allowed us to access a few crucial government documents that are not directly available on the official websites any more. We have also been attentive to the reiterations and revisions that do not merely overtake or shadow earlier documents. They sometimes erase earlier documents altogether as digital revisions. We do not have access to personal correspondence or internal institutional correspondence relating to the project. We are, however, skeptical of that happening as no protocols for the archiving of digital correspondence is yet in place with the Government of India. Doing recent history of India is becoming an ever more difficult exercise that historians must urgently attend to, if we are to make the present ready to have its own past in the future.

References

[1] Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India. “The History of Aakash Low Cost Access cum Computing Device.” Sakshat. October 05, 2011. http://archive.sakshat.ac.in/pdf/Final_Note_Aakash.pdf.

[2] Mukherjee, Arindam. “Bonsai Netbooks.” Outlook. February 16, 2009. http://www.outlookindia.com/article/Bonsai-Netbooks/239719.

[3] Raina, Pamposh, and Mia Li. “India’s ‘Aakash,’ Now Made in China.” The New York Times. November 26, 2012. http://india.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/26/india%E2%80%99s-super-cheap-tablet-now-made-in-china/.

[4] Nanda, Prashant K., and Surabhi Agarwal. “Government Close to Giving Up on Aakash Project.” Mint. March 22, 2013. http://www.livemint.com/Politics/fmEi8gsOSFgOzSTFfLsw6J/Govt-almost-gives-up-on-Aakash-says-no-point-in-hardware-ob.html.

[5] Chopra, Ritika. “Kapil Sibal's Cheap Aakash Proves to be a Dud.” Mail Today. January 08, 2012. http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/kapil-sibal-cheapest-tablet-of-world-aakash-failure/1/167730.html.

[6] Julka, Harsimran. “14 Lakh Aakash Tablets Booked in 14 Days.” The Economic Times. January 03, 2012. http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/hardware/14-lakh-aakash-tablets-booked-in-14-days/articleshow/11345695.cms. Parthasarathi, Ashok. “Cloudy Outlook for Aakash.” The Hindu. May 21, 2012 (Updated: May 22, 2012). http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/article3439629.ece.

[7] Comptroller and Auditor General of India, Government of India. Report No. 19 of 2013 - Union Government (Civil) - Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General of India on Compliance Audit Observations. Government of India. 2013. http://www.cag.gov.in/content/report-no-19-2013-compliance-audit-observations-union-governmentcivil.

[8] At an event in late 2013, Kapil Sibal admitted, “[the] Aakash tablet was my dream but it was not fulfilled, I tried hard...” Quoted in Press Trust of India. “Kapil Sibal: Aakash Tablet is My Unfulfilled Dream.” Financial Express. December 24, 2013. http://www.financialexpress.com/news/kapil-sibal-aakash-tablet-is-my-unfulfilled-dream/1211284/0 .

[9] See [1].

Note: This is an edited excerpt from a paper titled ‘The Aakash Tablet and Technological Imaginaries of Mass Education in Contemporary India’ recently published in History and Technology, on 5 February, 2016. The paper can be accessed here: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/07341512.2015.1136142 (the first 50 downloads are free).

Cross-posted from South Asia @ LSE Blog.

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